The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature

266 Pages·1969·13.885 MB·English

by  Charles I. Glicksberg (auth.)

THE IRONIC VISION IN MODERN LITERATURE
THE IRONIC VISION IN
MODERN LITERATURE
by
CHARLES 1. GLICKSBERG
Brooklyn College
of the City University
of New York
•
MAR TIN USN IJ H 0 F F / THE HAG U E / 1 9 69
ISBN 978-94-015-0386-0 ISBN 978-94-015-0977-0 (eBook)
DOl 10.1007/978-94-015-0977-0
© Copyright 1969 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
To Elena
T ABLE OF CONTENTS
PAR T I: THE EVOLUTION OF IRONY
Chapter I: The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature 3
1. The "Etiology" of Irony 3
2. The Age of Irony 11
3. Morphology and Mutations of Literary Irony 17
Chapter II: Tragic Irony: Ancient and Modern 25
1. Sophoclean Irony 25
2. Euripidean Irony 30
3. Tragic Irony on the Modern Scene 32
PART II: THE PHILOSOPHERS SET
THE STAGE FOR THE IRONIC VISION 37
Chapter III: Schopenhauer: The Implicit Irony of Pessimism 39
Chapter IV: The Dilemma of the Superman 51
1. Nietzschean Nihilism 51
2. Why Spake Zarathustra Thus? 56
3. Ironic Implications of Nietzsche's Gospel 58
PAR TIll: R ELI G IOU SIR 0 N Y 63
Chapter V: Irony and the Religious Quest 65
1. The Paradox of Faith 65
2. The Irony of Kierkegaard 71
3. Dostoevski and the Irony of the Irrational 74
Chapter VI: Death the Supreme Ironist 81
1. Tolstoy and the Death of Ivan Ilyitch 81
2. The Metaphysics of Death 87
VIII TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAR T IV: IRONY IN MODERN POETR Y,
FICTION, AND DRAMA 93
Chapter VII: Thomas Hardy the Cosmic Ironist 95
1. Scientific Pessimism and the Ironic Vision 95
2. Cosmic Irony in The Dynasts 104
Chapter VIII: Anatole France and Aesthetic Irony 116
1. Aestheticism and Skepticism 116
2. Penguin Island 123
3. The Revolt of the Angels 127
4. Conclusion 130
Chapter IX: Chekhov's Naturalistic Irony 132
1. The Quality of Chekhovian Irony 132
2. Irony in Chekhov's Plays 134
Chapter X: Illusion Versus Reality 142
1. The Relativity of Truth 142
2. The Truth of Life 144
3. O'Neill and the Iceman Cometh 151
PART V: IRONY AND THE DIABOLICAL 157
Chapter XI: The Devil as Ironist 159
1. The Sources of the Diabolical 159
2. Dostoevski and the Devil 166
3. Mark Twain's The Mysteriolls Stranger 175
4. The Shavian Devil 178
5. Valery and Mephistopheles 182
Chapter XII: The Irony of Thomas Mann 193
1. The Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean Influence 193
2. Buddenbrooks 196
3. The Magic Mountain 200
4. Doctor Faustus 204
PART VI: THE NIHILISM OF THE ABSURD
AND THE ABSURDITY OF ART 215
Chapter XIII: The Irony of the Absurd 217
1. The Metaphysical Basis of Nihilistic Irony 217
2. The Absurdist Hero 223
3. The Myth of the Absurd 226
4. The Literature of the Absurd 228
5. The Irony of Ionesco 229
6. Beckett's Vision of the Absurd 236
7. The Absurdity of Art 241
TABLE OF CONTENTS IX
PAR T VII: CONCL USION 251
Chapter XIV: Conclusion 253
Index 262
PART ONE:
THE EVOLUTION OF IRONY
CHAPTER I
THE IRONIC VISION IN MODERN LITERATURE
1. The "Etiology" of Irony
In 1908 Alexander Blok, the Russian poet, wrote this diagnosis of the
modern temper:
All the most lively and sensitive children of our century are stricken by a disease un
known to doctors and psychiatrists. It is related to the disorders of the soul and might
be called "irony." Its symptoms are fits of an exhausting laughter which starts with a
diabolical mockery and a provocative smile and ends as rebellion and sacrilege.1
In this passage Blok defines some of the leading traits of the syndrome
known as irony. In literature irony announces itself by the explosive
laughter of the rebellious hero who laughs at everything the world re
gards as sacred. Then he proceeds to laugh at himself and even laughs at
the nihilistic simulation of laughter. No sense of piety restrains him from
giving mordant expression to his vision of the void. Life is a meaningless
dance, a whirlwind of mechanical energy, a game that follows no com
prehensible rules and that can never be won, a joke, a thing of sound and
fury signifying nothing. All distinctions are confounded: good and evil,
comedy and tragedy, heaven and hell, spirit and flesh, mind and body.
Not even the man of assured religious faith can, in our time, protect
himself entirely against the inroads of irony; when faith is eroded by the
acids of unbelief the perverse sacrilege of irony makes itself felt.
Twentieth-century literature is in many ways committed, for better or
worse, to the ironic mode.2 Though the modern writer inherits a cultural
as well as artistic tradition, he is often in opposition to it or at least to
that part of it which assumes the existence of a meaningful world. He
will allow no illusions, however consolatory, to stand in his way of ap-
1 Quoted in Abram Tert?, On Socialist Realism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1960, p. 74.
2 Northrop Frye rightly states "that the ironic tone is central to modern literature."
Northrop Frye, "The Road to Excess," in Myth and Symbol. Edited by Bernice Slote. Lincoln,
Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1963, p. 11.
4 THE EVOLUTION OF IRONY
prehending and interpreting a reality that is infinitely complex, am
biguous, enigmatic, if not unknowable; he will not indulge in the vice of
pathos nor in the weakness of sentimental pity. No cause here for tears
or even the sustained note of seriousness. If, in his role as ironist, he is
fearful of falling into what Sartre calls "bad faith," he is nevertheless
capable of laughing at himself and the metaphysical dilemma on the
horns of which he finds himself impaled. He has no exalted notion of his
mission as an artist; the creative function, too, is exposed to ironic de
valuation; his work, he suspects, is useless, a way of spinning out the
tedious thread of time, a means, one among many, of enduring the gra
tuitous burden of existence. By resorting to the face-saving device of
irony, he can contemplate the image of the universal absurd without
being defeated by it. Irony enables him to picture life as comedy or farce
or chaos and seems to justify his speaking out at all instead of relapsing
into nirvanic silence. When Ortega declares that he very much doubts
"that any young person of our time can be impressed by a poem, a
painting, or a piece of music that is not flavored with a dash of irony,"3
he is simply pointing out the power and pervasiveness of the ironic spirit
m our age.
It is only within the past century or so that the term irony acquires its
complex of ambivalent meaning. Today it enters constitutively into the
making of both tragedy and comedy, fusing the two in a kind of inter
dependent unity, so that neither is ever pure. In the classical age in Eng
land irony was employed chiefly as a rhetorical device useful in attacking
a person or thing. Not until the devastating work of such satirists as
Defoe and Swift had been accomplished was irony widely used in literary
discourse, but it flourished largely as a verbal weapon, a method whereby
praise was skilfully utilized to cast blame. Gradually the concept of irony
was expanded. The most popular meaning was contained in the device of
saying the opposite of what one meant, but the technique of blaming by
means of dissimulated praise was retained, so that the art of understate
ment and derision came into its own. Then it was discovered that irony
could be profitably used not only in the sphere of satire and polemics but
also in the delineation of characters. Dramatic irony emerged in the fic
tional narratives of the eighteenth century. All this, however, underwent
a series of radical changes in the nineteenth and twentieth cenruries.4
3 Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Notes on the Novel. New York:
Peter Smith, 1951, p. 48.
4 "Cosmic irony, the popular irony of Fate, dramatic irony, Socratic and Romantic irony,
the ironies of tension and paradox promulgated by the New Critics - we have only to try
cataloguing these and the rest to realize how complex are the meanings now available in