TSAI

ALLEGORY AND IRONY: PAUL DE MAN

The key implications of Derridean post-structuralism for poetry and irony were spelled out by Paul de Man, one of the Yale school theorists who re-read Romantic poetry in the light of deconstruction. At first glance it might seem that de Man is a far more conservative thinker than Derrida, particularly in his commitment to irony (Gearhart 1983, 77). Derrida’s main objection to structuralism was its linguisticism; far from thinking difference radically, structuralism merely explained differences as effects of some general and homogenous system of signs. Against this, Derrida looked at texts in terms other than those of signification. The force of a text is not just its sense—the meaning that we must assume it intends—but connections, connotations and productions that are unintended.

De Man’s emphasis on literature and the inescapability of irony would seem to fall back into a Romantic notion that language is a subjective medium, and that we can only think what is other than language from some ironic awareness within language. But this would deny de Man’s stress on the concomitant impossibility and necessity of irony. On the one hand, irony does seem to expose the naivete of an ‘allegorical’ account of language: the idea that our language seems to double or correspond to some world. On the other hand, any self-conscious irony that felt it could step outside all allegorical illusion by seeing the world and self as an effect of text and language would itself be subject to a far greater illusion. There can be no point of ironic self-destruction—where ‘we’ realise that our identity and our world are textually produced. Any such realisation would have to repress a necessary allegory. This would not be a naive allegory that posited a real world behind signs, but an allegory that recognised that all we can do is to write allegorically. To write, or narrate, is necessarily to produce a gap or distance between a text and what it signifies. At the same time, this signified or referent is only given from the position of the signifier or text. Our nature is always an inscribed and textual nature; our identity is always a type of character or fiction. Without the function of allegory—without the narrated or imagined difference between a world and its symbolisation—there could be no ironic self-realisation. We can never arrive at some point of pure ironic self-coincidence, where we see ourselves and our world as mere textual effects. For we can only think ironically after the creation of ourselves through allegory, or through the imagined difference between a literal world and a signified world.

The problem or difference of allegory and irony relies on the irreducible function of narration. On the one hand, there can be no world, self or experience without some allegorical narration: some sense of signs as being other than or different from an original reality. On the other hand, one can also recognise—ironically—that this supposedly original and unattainable reality can only be perceived as original through some narrative that produces itself as allegorical, as not the thing itself. De Man’s emphasis on literature and irony, rather than philosophy and reflection, is crucial here. Philosophy would see language as a medium for reflection; we can speak in order to recognise ourselves as above and beyond the signs we use. Literature, by contrast, abandons this aim of circular self-coincidence. Any language we might use to reflect upon and know ourselves actually produces the self it supposedly names, and does so through narration—through naming what must have been.

For de Man, time is not a coherent medium of a before and after that we then name (and then reflect upon ironically). Time is given or distributed through narration. Only with the minimal narration of a past and self who will speak could there be the essential function of allegory—of signs being different from the world—and the no less essential but impossible irony that strives to think this narration:

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world…Allegory and irony are thus linked in their common discovery of a truly temporal predicament.

(de Man 1983, 222)

In Paul de Man’s terms: it is only through narrating the self that there is a self at all. We cannot think of selves who narrate, precisely because selves are formed through narration. But we could also never arrive at a ‘theory’ of this process of narration: ‘any theory of irony is the undoing, the necessary undoing, of any theory of narrative, and it is ironic, as we say, that irony always comes up in relation to theories of narrative, when irony is precisely what makes it impossible ever to achieve a theory of narrative that would be consistent’ (de Man 1996, 179). To think of the self as created through narrative is itself narrative. De Man turns back to Romantic irony and gives it a post-structuralist twist. The spirit or imagination that is belied by any of its forms or definitions is created through those secondary definitions. For de Man, only literature can be authentic (Gearhart 1983, 80); only literature acknowledges that it creates through narrative, rather than presenting narrative as the representation of some mythical prior reality. Romantic irony is, therefore, all-consuming. Any attempt to think a position or self outside literary voices must itself adopt some literary style. Philosophers, historians or scientists who speak with an authority that is supposedly above and beyond stylistic variations have merely repressed the stylistic dimension of their own discourse.

De Man’s elevation of literature, as the only authentic rhetoric of temporality—because it reflects on the way it produces a before and after, an origin and fall, an authentic and inauthentic voice—is also an insistence on the impossibility and inescapability of the subject. To assume that subjects are effects of forces is to disavow and repress the subjective activity—the narration—that explains those forces. At the same time, while we can only think and criticise our thinking from some subjective point of view, that ‘subject’ is an effect of narration. While the modern lyric seeks to reflect upon and destroy this narrative illusion of the subject, by turning back on itself and describing the process of its own creation, de Man nevertheless insists that one cannot escape this condition of impossible irony and allegory. De Man maintains, extends and criticises the German Romantic tradition. He recognises the ethical and political predicament of Romanticism—that its gesture to a pre-subjective absolute does seem to abandon our responsibility or our role in the creation of this absolute. But he also recognises that ethical authenticity—the attempt to take control of the ways in which our narratives produce us and our origins—must always be contaminated by inauthenticity. We write and think belatedly, from a textual condition we can neither master nor abandon. The attempt to think beyond the ethical dilemmas of Romanticism would need, therefore, to think beyond the logic of authenticity and originality. It may be that the pre-linguistic origin is an effect of language and narration, and can therefore never be grasped. But does this mean that we should remain in a position of necessary impossibility or ironic finitude? Perhaps we need to think beyond irony and the questions of originality and subjectivity.

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