CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy “NOT THE TRUTH BUT THE WAY”: THE ETHICS OF IRONY IN WORLD LITERATURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY ELISABETH GRANQUIST ALDERKS IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ADVISOR: TIMOTHY BRENNAN June 2019 © Elisabeth Granquist Alderks 2019 i Acknowledgements I have been blessed with so much support as I worked on this dissertation, for which I am extraordinarily grateful. I find it difficult to express the gratitude I feel to each person who helped make this project possible, but here is my humble attempt: First, thank you to my dissertation advisor, Timothy Brennan, who seriously engaged with my scholarship and pushed me to articulate the stakes of my argument. This project originated in his Spring 2014 course on Dialectics and Dialectical Thought and he enthusiastically supported my proposal to analyze irony in world literature despite the risks posed by the topic. I am exceedingly grateful for his encouragement to tackle this multifaceted project, as well as his guidance about how to engage the question of irony as an ethical device. Thanks to Ellen Messer-Davidow for her thorough comments on my chapters, in various stages of completion, and her incisive questions about the spectrum of intelligibility. My writing has benefitted at each step from her careful attention. I learned a great deal about world literature from Shaden Tageldin in a seminar that profoundly impacted my career; I owe her thanks for her thorough feedback and advice about how to respectfully enter in to these debates. Last and certainly not least, I am grateful to Michael Hancher for his support and his thought-provoking questions about the implications of defining irony along these lines. I was motivated, in part, to write this dissertation by the camaraderie of my graduate student colleagues in the English department at the University of Minnesota. Thank you to Abhay Doshi, David Lemke, Jacqueline Patz, Kristina Popiel, and Zoë Rodine for their companionship, encouragement, distraction, and commiseration, not to ii mention the hours they spent helping me articulate my argument. Learning about my own work from them, and learning from their projects, has been invaluable to my intellectual growth. Thanks also go to Melissa Merte, Jonas Gardsby, Bomi Yoon, Yon Ji Sol, and Sungjin Shin for their invaluable support as I was in the thick of the writing process. I’m grateful for this community in Lind 4! Completing this dissertation would not have been possible without the support of my family. To my parents, Mark and Kathy Granquist, thank you for encouraging my inquisitiveness and enabling my persistence, for answering panicked phone calls and editing email drafts, and above all for modeling what it looks like to strive for balance in intellectual and family life. To my brother Robert, thanks for encouraging me to get out of my own head and distracting me with terrible jokes and fantastic board games. To my in-laws, Larry and Luann Alderks, thank you for your love, your eagerness to learn about the weird world that is academia, and your generosity with your time and wine. To Kieran and Augustus, I’m grateful that you guys are my constant writing companions and the best, most comforting distractions I could ask for. And of course, I am ceaselessly thankful to Blaine, my husband, for being my first and best sounding board, for knowing which questions to ask and when to ask them, and for believing in me regardless of the circumstances. Thanks for keeping the house standing and all of us alive for the past six years. I love you very much. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to Blaine, for his endless support and patience. iv Abstract Scholars have dismissed literary irony for many reasons; two common objections contend that the device facilitates social disengagement disguised as textual play and that it requires of the reader such extensive social, historical, and linguistic knowledge that it cannot be fully appreciated outside its context of production. In “‘Not the truth but the way’: The Ethics of Irony in World Literature” I refute these myths and demonstrate that the device’s social engagement facilitates readers’ understanding of both irony and the socio-historical context that the author describes in the work. I first tackle claims about the device’s capacity for ethical social engagement. In contradiction to Anglo-American formalism and its resonances in subsequent schools of literary theory, Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of controlled irony provides a framework for understanding how it operates as a mode of social critique. The fact that the device can function in this socially engaged way both challenges the assertion that irony is always apolitical and signals to the reader the author’s socio-political concerns. In analyzing a moment of indirect critique, readers learn about the defining concerns of the author’s context; in this way, irony can function as an Ansatzpunkt, Erich Auerbach’s term for a point of departure, through which readers learn about different nations, cultures, and eras. I analyze three world literary texts—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and two twentieth-century adaptations of it, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Wilson Harris’s The Infinite Rehearsal—to illustrate this idea. Not only can irony be socially engaged and be understood outside its original context, the device also facilitates the circulation of world literature in the global marketplace. Irony thus v contributes to cross-cultural understanding, an ethical stage necessary to the process of historical development. vi Table of Contents Introduction Immortal Indirection: Irony’s Lives and Afterlives ......................................................... 1 Chapter One The Ironic Enterprise: Formalisms, Paradox, and Sedentary Canons ............................ 13 Chapter Two Earnest Eirons:Ethical Indirection in World Literature .................................................. 45 Chapter Three “The great heathen”: The Ironies of German Lutheranism in Goethe’s Faust .............. 84 Chapter Four “Obdurate Facts”: Subversive Historians in The Master and Margarita .................... cxvi Chapter Five The “Dubious El Dorado”: Illusions of Progress in The Infinite Rehearsal .............. cxlvi Conclusion The Importance of Being Ironic: Indirect Critique and Technologies of Circulation .................................................................................................................................. clxxiii Notes…………………………………………………………………………….…….176 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 199 1 Introduction Immortal Indirection: Irony’s Lives and Afterlives By all accounts, irony should be dead. Critics proclaim many events and individuals to be the final nail in irony’s coffin, including the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001; the Iraq War; novels by David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, nonfiction by Jedidiah Purdy and Christy Wampole, and philosophical tracts by Judith Butler, Peter Sloterdijk, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential election and, for entirely different reasons, Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential election; Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton; and the ubiquity of social media.1 As novelist Colson Whitehead quipped to The New York Times, “[s]omething bad happens, like 9/11, it’s the death of irony … Something good happens, like Obama’s win, it’s the death of irony. When will someone proclaim the death of iceberg lettuce? I’m sick of it making my salads boring” (qtd. in Newman). Regardless of the number of times it has supposedly died, irony has never truly lost its prominence in the pantheon of literary devices. In some senses, irony is the hydra of literary devices, not only refusing to die when its head is chopped off but also reasserting its dominance with greater force than ever. Irony, more than many literary devices, has sparked vociferous debate about its relevance to and appropriateness in public discourse.2 Defining irony might allow us to better appreciate the stakes in these perpetual debates, but even the act of defining the 2 device has sparked disagreement.3 While studies of irony tend to begin with the disclaimer that there are too many possible definitions to enumerate them all, its most fundamental definition is that what is said is the opposite of what is meant; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite” (1a). When a friend exclaims, “lovely day, isn’t it?” during a downpour, or a colleague enthuses “that went well” after a particularly difficult meeting, we as interlocutors understand we cannot take these utterances at face value but rather must invert their meaning. In Irony and the Ironic D.C. Muecke identifies some of irony’s common features present in most iterations: in crafting an ironic utterance the speaker contrasts what is said with what is meant and assumes his message will be understood, both conversational partners play active roles in constructing the utterance’s meaning, and the interlocutor gains a sense of pleasure from recognizing this double meaning (35). In short, Muecke writes, irony has a corrective function