The irony of Coleridge’s clerisy lies in the thoroughly secular nature of its defense of theology. It also lies in the thoroughly theological ground of its secular ideals. More precisely, it lies in the impossibility and the necessity of bringing these together. The choice of the word irony to describe On the Constitution of Church and State may always seem a bit counter-intuitive. It is far from an amusing read—Coleridge could not be more in earnest—but romantic irony is no joke. To refer again to Schlegel, this time on Socratic irony in the Lyceum: "It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication". Linking "irony" and "clerisy" draws out the structure of fundamental "antagonism" that they share. In this context, too, it becomes clear that irony is not so much the crisis of clerisy or clerisy a response to that crisis as that both are negotiations of antithetical structures that can be traced across boundaries of subjectivity, culture and theology, philosophy and poetry.
Such negotiations are the topic of the essays that follow. All are variegated and nuanced in ways that the telegraphic summaries of an introduction cannot hope to convey. One rather marked difference, however, between all of them and my own formulations lies in the greater prominence they give to political questions and concepts. Adam Carter's "'Insurgent Governments': Romantic Irony and the Theory of the State" specifically traces the relation between Schlegel's theory of irony and his theory of the state. It suggests, too, the tensions—productive but also dangerous—between an ironic dialectic of political pluralism and the impositions of arbitrary authority that bring it to a halt even in the relatively early writings of the Lyceum and Athenaeum fragments. The next two essays take up quite explicitly the question of political apostasy that, I think, hovers in the margins of Carter's discussion of Schlegel. More particularly, they take up the political turn from revolutionary to reactionary that constitutes the narrative irony of so many romantic trajectories. Charles Mahoney's "The Multeity of Coleridgean Apostasy" reads Coleridge's own working through of "apostasy" as the very principle of vacillation against which and yet through which his thought takes shape. Mahoney suggests apostasy as a uniquely Coleridgean translation of Schlegelian irony: a falling away from any possibility of foundational or static principles, that is all too often misread—even by Coleridge himself—as the foundation for yet another stance. Linda Brigham's "Alastor, Apostasy, and the Ecology of Criticism," reads Shelley's poem as offering an analysis of just such ironies of apostasy especially as they shape Shelley's own reading of Wordsworth. In Alastor, Shelley dramatizes a tale of two poets to explore how a Wordsworthian opposition to an earlier or an other self (a perfection taken to the point of irony) produces the mirror image of what it opposes. This reading of the poem brings it into closer conjunction with later Shelley works such as Prometheus Unbound, but Brigham also implicates contemporary literary criticism and theoretical debate in a similarly structured dialectic of opposition and identity. In Shelley, she finds a different model of reading and writing, one whose point of departure includes a sheer "communication of pleasure" that (in Shelley's view) Wordsworth has replaced with a symmetrical discourse of sympathy that can all too easily give way to ideology and totalization. This threat is reflected (in Brigham's view) in the totalizing implications, whether sympathetic or oppositional, of much academic debate. The concluding essay, Forest Pyle's "'Frail Spells': Shelley and the Ironies of Exile" takes up similar problems, but situates them in relation to Shelley's rhetoric of exile. Pyle argues that Shelley can be productively read as deriving a powerful and liberator language of critique both from his position of exile from Britain and from a supplementary critique of the concepts of nation and homeland that underwrite that position. The dialectic of contemporary criticism that would recuperate exile—or "Diaspora"—as a position of authoritative critique fails to take such a supplementary critique of exile into account—a mistake that Shelley, in Pyle's reading, does not make. Shelly's "exile" operates, therefore, as a limit case of "epistemological irony so extensive that it disqualifies the claims of any clerisy to escape it." As in Brigham's reading, Shelley is used as a lens through which to focus on debates in contemporary criticism, though the emphasis is on the remainders of knowledge rather than those of pleasure. In a broader sense, all four of the pieces gathered here reflect an interest in "irony" and "clerisy" not only as historical artifacts but as historical forces at once enabling and disrupting the antithetical structuring of an ongoing scholarly, critical, and pedagogical Building.
II. 5. Translation of Irony
Translation-violence-irony. These are interesting terms with which we can conceive of "The Classic". For it is we who conceive the classic, and that conception is, to follow Derrida, an invention, a translation, and thus - in its inventive deconstruction - ironically violent in its criticism.
"The classic" is an important category in the work of J.M. Coetzee. In many of his novels, the category is deployed and problematic. In his novel Age of Iron, for instance, the narrator (Elizabeth Curren) is "a retired lecturer in classics whose canon means little to anyone but herself", as Attwell puts it (1993, 121). In Foe, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is interrogated, while in The Master of Petersburg it is Dostoyevsky (in particular The Possessed) which is rewritten. And there is the farm novel, the colonial travelogue, possibly Kafka ... At the same time, Coetzee himself has become something of a "master", who has received literary prizes, and whose work is prescribed regularly as required reading for students. And, of course, many books and various academic papers have been written on Coetzee.
What would be the relation between Coetzee's texts and the classics which they rewrite? What would be the relation between Coetzee's own texts and their deployment - being accorded the status of "classics" themselves? Rather, it is the category of the classic itself, the object of knowledge if you wish, which will provide the frame of the present purview II.
The refusal to translate the proper name "apartheid" may be read as an impossible attempt to prevent the elision of "the proper name into a common noun" to keep the discourse of "apartheid" at a distance by insisting that it "function outside the language system". This refusal to translate "apartheid" may thus be read as an attempt both to speak the unspeakable and to shirk responsibility and accountability, as an attempt to refuse contamination by (the discourse which is named by) "apartheid". The discourse named by "apartheid" is itself, of course, a discourse of disease. The discourse of disease which functions to cleanse, and purge, the pure Aryan blood, is, ironically, itself sought to be kept at a distance for fear of infection, as Derrida notes: Since then, no tongue has ever translated this name - as if all the languages of the world were defending themselves, shutting their mouths against a sinister incorporation of the thing by means of the word, as if all tongues were refusing to give an equivalent, refusing to let themselves be contaminated through the contagious hospitality of the word-for-word . But this would imply that the word "apartheid" (and what it names) is at once kept at a distance from (it is a foreign word) and, by virtue of it being used as if it were a word from the vernacular, incorporated into the language in question (rather than using a word from the vernacular to name what "apartheid" names). The word "apartheid", therefore, like the word Babel at once belongs to, and at the same time does not belong to the language into which it is transferred. By the logic of a survival through translation, the original is at once perpetuated and destroyed. In the untranslatability of "apartheid", or, then, in the refusal to translate "apartheid", this logic is suspended: the word is perpetuated by not being translated. In not being translated the original word is - or is sought to be - kept as a ghastly monument, an eternally historicized reminder of atrocity, frozen in time. Apartheid, as a translation which is not a translation, is sought to be kept singular and other by transcending and at the same time affirming history.
This paper seeks to examine the ways in which the attempt to negotiate the otherness of language (as for instance staged in the refusal to translate "apartheid") operate by examining notions of the classic as they are related to Coetzee's work, in particular to his reading of T.S. Eliot's classic essay "What is a Classic?"
In this paper it’s possible to examine notions pertaining to the relation between the classic and its translation, its afterlife, by reading Coetzee's essay on Eliot. This will be done with reference to Walter Benjamin's well-known essay on "The Task of the Translator", a text which is itself a classic on the survival of the classic, and which is left unsaid by Coetzee. Doing this would entail theorizing the relation between the classic read as original, and its various "translations", which may be read as ironic reconstitutions or transplantations of the classic. This irony, it would be contention, functions violently in that the "afterlife" of the classic is dependent - precisely - upon the denial of the notion of a pure origin, of an untainted classic. The classic needs translation; it can only survive if it becomes other to itself, if it is violated and "contaminated" by translation.
This means that the oppositional relation between classic and translation may be deconstructed. Dissemination is contamination, and the dissemination of the classic is the contamination of that classic, in a way which is ironic in a similar way that the refusal to translate "apartheid" is both dissemination and contamination.
The classic is figured in the translation as metaphor of itself; but this figuration of the classic in the translation of itself is ironic because the price attached to figuration is emasculation, as the relation is "not based on resemblance". The classic is emasculated in its embodiment; it is incorporated at the price of losing its corporeality. In its afterlife, its survival, the classic becomes a ghost, an echo of itself. It becomes an other. Translation makes the classic other to itself - "it disarticulates the original" - at the same moment that it seeks to affirm the originally identity of the classic. It is in terms of this incorporation, this loss of pure body, that Friedrich Schleiermacher's conception of what might be called "foreignizing translation" may be read.
Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him. Foreignizing translation may be understood as an attempt to preserve the original integrity of the classic and counteract its "disappearance as a text, as writing, as a body of language" by insisting upon the difference between the original and its translation, by deploying the translation as a handmaiden of the original. This move may be seen as anti-ironic; the translation would within such a scenario function as a restatement not only of the integrity of the pure original, but of the author of that original, in that the control of the author over the text is sought to be retained.
Even though Benjamin approvingly quotes Pannwitz's remarks relating to the need for the fidelity of the translator to the original to be measured in terms of "'allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue'" , this does not amount to the kind of hierarchical reversal between translation and original which Schleiermacher would support. It does not amount to a kind of "return to origins". On the contrary, Benjamin might be said to define fidelity to the original as infidelity, or - rather - as a deconstruction of the hierarchical tension between "[fidelity" and "freedom" which "have traditionally been regarded as conflicting tendencies". This is related to Benjamin's insistence that what defines the "Dichtwerk"- the "poet's work"or the poetic work - is something indefinable which "cannot be communicated”, so that the task of the translator is not to "communicate something". Thus Benjamin asks rhetorically: "For what is meant by freedom but that the rendering of sense is no longer regarded as all-important?" .The task of the translator, then, is to transcend specific languages, not by denying the difference between them, but by regaining pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux . In this pure language - which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages - all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.
In this movement of languages in translation towards a Messianic "pure language", "free translation" must be viewed not in terms of the communication of content, but in the emancipation from content, which "is the task of fidelity" understood as a kind of infidelity to the original. Thus the task of the translator is to "release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work". The translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux. Translation, in this sense, is already to be found within the original - one has to read the original between the lines, in "interlinear" fashion. The original can only be true to itself in not being true to itself, in the infidelity of a translation which is true to it. The original already contains its other.
This brings us back to the question of authority over the text. If the original contains within itself the translation of itself, then the opposition between author and translator disappears. Ultimately, then, the relation between classic and translation may be read in terms of the authority to articulate, and - precisely - the authority to articulate foreignness. As Benjamin notes, after all, "translation is ... a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages". It should not be surprising, therefore, that Schleiermacher (quoted above) refers not to the original text as much as to the author of that text .
The question of authority (both the authority to speak within a historically circumscribed if not determined situation, and the authority by implication to make accurate statements about a given set of circumstances) is of course an important one in Coetzee's work, as is already evident in Attwell's statement relating to Mrs Curren quoted earlier. On an epistemological level, the authority of the subject who narrates her/story is circumscribed because autobiography cannot but be endless, in that it is impossible for the subject to enclose her life within a narrative: one cannot recount one's own death. In this regard, it might be useful to note Coetzee's statement on the "blindness" of the autobiographer. In what may or may not be a pun , Coetzee distinguishes "autobiography ... from other biography". Not only must autobiography be distinguished from other kinds of biography; on the epistemological level biography is always other biography, or "autobiography", because it is only the history of an other which can be narrative in an apparently closed fashion. Autobiography must always remain quite explicitly open and incomplete. Of course, the autobiography in itself would be quite false, among other reasons because the act of narrating the self already implies a degree of other self, as much as narrating the other is in itself a project to be interrogated in terms of the epistemological boundaries related to the extent to which an other may be known. And autobiography is autobiography precisely because "it is the ear of the other that signs".
Both autobiography and biography as metaphors of life, as narratives and translations of history, may be said to depend on notions of pure, original primacy. History is hypostatized as a univocal, resolvable, recountable, representable, speakable text beyond history itself - a classic in other words. But what is the classic? The term "classic" may here be understood in terms of the original which, however, precisely does not have originary identity, as has been demonstrated. The classic results from the interplay of the translation upon its original as much as of the original upon its translation. The necessity of translation implies the impossibility of the classic, of classical identity. The classic may therefore be read as the object of philosophical desire: the desire for plenitude, fullness, meaning and truth. And translation, in this context, may be read as a problematic of the philosophical project. The philosophical project - the attempt to understand, to interpret, to abstract, to generalize: to control - is subverted by translation as a staging of the loss of control over the classic text. In terms of the insistence on the integrity of the original, Schleiermacher's project may, then, be understood as being properly philosophical in its attempt to reassert control over the text, over the original by - ironically - leaving it in peace. Leaving the original in peace, not controlling it, giving up authority over it, precisely reasserts the integrity of the original, and its authority, as well as the control over it by its author, and thus the identity of that author. In this regard it is, again, not coincidental that Schleiermacher refers to leaving the author in peace.