The Invention of Poetry in Early German Romanticism
| Autor: | Gerald L. Bruns |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Wordsworth Circle. 47:110-114 |
| ISSN: | 2640-7310 0043-8006 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/twc47020110 |
| Popis: | In one of his "Athenaeum Fragments," Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) writes: "The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself' (116). Taking this line as a starting point, I would like to propose that we think of the early German Romantics--specifically the Athenaeum group (1798-1801)--as the first avant-garde of literary modernism, where poetry is an instance of art "as such," a form in itself and not (simply) an instrument of mediation in behalf of signification, representation, or expressions of subjectivity. (1) Indeed, the celebrated post-Nietzschean critique of instrumental reason really has its origins in this period (1792-1803). As Friedrich Schlegel's brother, August Wilhelm, responding to Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), argued in his "Theory of Art" (1798), "it is necessary not to treat language in poetry as a mere instrument of the understanding" (1997: 205; and, in this volume, Andreas Michel and Oksiloff 157-79). Of course, the German Romantics are most often remembered for their concept of irony: "Philosophy is the real homeland of irony, which one would like to define as logical beauty: for whatever appears in oral or written dialogue--and is not simply confined into rigid systems--there irony should be asked for and provided ..." (Critical Fragments 42). Note the distinction between dialogue and system. One might say that Romantic irony is rooted in the rejection of consecutive reasoning or of any sort of categorical or systematic thinking--rooted, indeed, in the rejection of the ancient law of noncontradiction, as in Friedrich Schlegel's famous account of Socratic irony: (2) Socratic irony is the only involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation. It is equally impossible to feign or divulge it.... In this sort of irony, everything originates in the union of savoir-faire and scientific spirit, in the conjunction of a perfectly instinctive and a perfectly conscious philosophy. It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. It is the freest of all licenses, for by its means one transcends oneself; and yet it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary. It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke (Critical Fragments 108). (3) In short, irony is philosophically opposed to Hegelian thinking: irony is not dialectical (the construction of hierarchies) but paradoxical--"Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great" (Critical Fragments 48)--which is no doubt why Hegel turned against the Romantics. (4) Irony does not subsume the many into one but instead arranges them as singularities in a series, whence dialogue displaces dialectic, where "dialogue is a chain or garland of fragments" (Athenaeum Fragments 77), or what we modernists would now call "open form" (Hejinian, 2001: esp. 43). Schlegel again: "An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts ..." (Athenaeum Fragments 121). As if "absolute synthesis" were not the integration of opposites into a higher order but a dialogical project ("continual self-creating interchange") whose goal is to defer resolution or agreement indefinitely, as in Maurice Blanchot's "infinite conversation." (5) To he a Romantic is to be, not of one mind, but always of another. "The I must be divided into order to be I," writes Novalis in his "Fichte Studies" (1795-96).6 In any case, the "I" remains open, unfinished (like the conversation, an unmanaged meeting of minds that do not merge): "Even a friendly conversation which cannot be freely broken off at any moment, completely arbitrarily, has something intolerant about it" (Critical Fragments 32). … |
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