0415251338.Routledge.Irony.Nov.2003

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The German Romantics had seen both the novel and Shakespeare as
exemplary of irony. They recognised no literary-historical distinction
between the many voices of a novel and the absence of authorial
intrusion in Renaissance drama. But their conflation of both types of text
as ironic relies upon including both Shakespeare and novels within a
single movement that expresses subjectivity. Shakespeare, they argued,
in not being present creates an absent point of creativity, just as novels
with their many voices and characters also allow for a common ground
of life . Insofar as any text, modern or pre-modern, suggests a point of
creation not presented in the text, then it is an instance of irony. Against
this Romantic conflation, we can look at how literary texts in specific
historical contexts create different notions of just what a creative context
is. For novels, for example, one assumes that all events take place on
the common ground of a presupposed human nature, with plots being
the unfolding and development of this nature s possibilities. In pre-
modern texts, by contrast, such a universal humanity is absent. If
Shakespeare s plays are ironic in the German Romantic sense if they
adopt no single or clear expressed position then this is precisely
because they contest and play with the very notion of what can count as
144 HUMOUR AND IRONY
human. We might say that the Renaissance begins to form some sense
of a universal human point of view, some negotiation of various
historical and cultural contexts, but has not yet formed a clear notion of
man as universally shared nature. Shakespeare s Caliban in The
Tempest is not included in the human . Because he is outside the
interaction of court life and power he remains inassimilable. Unlike
Crusoe s man Friday, he is not a potential human nature awaiting
recognition; Caliban is asocial and therefore inhuman. There is, in the
Renaissance, no full sense of a man in general who can be recognised,
studied and communicated with across cultural and political boundaries.
One is human only through one s political activity.
We can say, perhaps, that there is a literary-historical trajectory
towards irony: from bodies collected in social space, to a sense of man
or human nature as underlying those bodies, until, finally, the notion of
the subject who recognises himself as having existed all along in
various historical contexts. In forming the concept of the subject as other
than any expressed body, self or humanity, the Romantics also allowed
for the possibility of reading literary history: not just reading texts from
the past, but in reading those texts as past, as different expressions of a
constantly differing subjectivity. We can only form a notion of the
subject through reflection on the various modes of life through which
that subjectivity is expressed. According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is
the creation and perception of a common body that produces a social
whole. It is the creation of man in general, or the white, rational body
of reason and good sense, that produces a universal community which
then leads to the ironic notion of the subject: that point of view elevated
above life and detached from any specific body (Deleuze and Guattari
1983).
JOYOUS STUPIDITY
Irony detaches itself from any specific time or culture and can imagine
itself as a point of view that surveys life or history as one unified
plane. According to Deleuze and Guattari, we can both chart the
creation of the image of the subject in history and see how this very
concept of subjectivity produces history as a single horizon. Their
counter-ironic task is not to produce a point of view above and beyond
life, but to see life itself as a humorous or joyous multiplicity of
incommensurable perceptions (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 194). This
HUMOUR AND IRONY 145
would be directly opposed to the tendency of Romantic irony and
subjectivity, which ultimately recognises all life as the expression of an
absent or presupposed ground. For Deleuze and Guattari the creation of
a history is itself an historical event: a convergence of multiple lines or
planes of becoming that occurs through a later act of interpretation. We
recognise the past as the creation of the present; we recognise other
cultures as different expressions of our own, and we think ironically,
with each event being interpretable from some ultimate human
standpoint. We can, therefore, see literary history as the creation, rather
than expression, of the plane of human history, with texts reading the
past and other cultures as different expressions of the one human life.
History has moved progressively towards capitalism, towards an ever-
expanding political body through the production of an increasingly
homogenised or universal notion of subjectivity that we all share. It
is in capitalism that social connections need to be all-inclusive, with
every body being human insofar as it is capable of labour and
exchange (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). Man is created as a common
power behind exchange and production.
Eighteenth-century literature, through its narratives of travel,
everywhere finds the same common body, a body with a tendency to
acquire wealth, exchange property and form families and societies in
response to the needs of life. Whereas earlier social formations and
literary productions had placed the social body first, such that
Renaissance tragedies depict the havoc that ensues with the disruption or
transgression of political order (Moretti 1988), eighteenth-century
literature begins with individuals, often infants or foundlings, who
produce social relations because of the nature of man. Swift s Gulliver s
Travels is a satire in two senses. First, its object is man. Despite the travels [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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