Afterword: Irony and Mimesis in The Act of Interpretation

Two important characteristics of the mimetic method are irony and a distance between what an author represents and his own attitudes or position. When used in a theoretical work the method depends for its success on the reader's being alive to the constant possibility of reversals and complications in the apparent progress of the argument. Since the views dramatized are valid yet inadequate, their truth and their limitations must both be present in their representation and every statement must be apprehended from both perspectives. Each position is given full sway while it is on the stage, yet the seeds of its reversal are present within it. No matter how strong an argument may appear initially, the envolving structure of which it is a part is deliberately suspensive. The position that appears to triumph at one stage in the discussion is subject to reversal at a subsequent stage as a result of further reflections that are made possible by the consideration of other positions and possibilities. As the discussion proceeds, the untested assumptions and problems implicit in previously adopted views become apparent — thus the entire inquiry is always simultaneously progressive and reflexive.

I employed these procedures in a continuous fashion throughout the first chapter. In its overall movement the chapter appeared to enact a successful process of Hegelian Aufhebung in which the first two theories and the interpretations they offered were necessarily and successfully incorporated in the third. Subsequent considerations showed, however, that this result was only apparent, and when we returned to "The Bear" in chapter 4 the conclusion reached at the end of chapter 1 was reversed. The relationship between the conclusion of chapter 1 and the argument developed at the end of chapter 4 is one of the major ironies of The Act of Interpretation. I note it here to indicate that the irony of the book is not local and occasional, but structural and comprehensive.

There are both theoretical and rhetorical reasons behind my use of such strategies. One derives from the fact that I conceive the audience for whom the book is intended as the subject as well as the observer of my irony. I have tried to create a structure of thought in which critics of various persuasions will become caught up in a process of self-discovery as a direct result of finding themselves implicated in problems they had not anticipated and forced by the movement of the inquiry to pursue theoretical and philosophic issues most would prefer to avoid. Like Hamlet's mousetrap, The Act of Interpretation is designed to catch the reader in the act of assenting to assumptions and beliefs he is not aware he employs precisely because those assumptions and beliefs so pervade criticism today that they have become a second and unconscious nature to us; we are scarcely aware how thoroughly we depend upon them or how questionable they might appear to a reflective gaze. The effort throughout the book has been to make explicit the enabling assumptions and principles of explanation that characterize a number of different critical positions within an overarching context in which the questionable nature of those assumptions and procedures becomes apparent. Rather than directing my critique at a single critical audience or school, by covertly endorsing another, my purpose has been to call attention to the hidden dogmas and covert principles of reasoning that characterize the many distinct positions that make up the contemporary critical scene. Thus the effort in chapter 1, for example, is to imitate the different kinds of explanation that carry conviction for the adherents of each of the positions considered — a conviction dependent, as we subsequently discover, upon the fact that the principles on which those interpretations are based assume precisely what is to be proved.

Those who have studied it most closely have called attention to the great demands that the mimetic method places upon the reader. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was as old as its hero before critics began appreciating its ironies, and we are still far from completely understanding the structural rigorousness and unity of the ironic method Joyce developed in that novel. Many readers still identify with Emma Bovary and Frederic Morel, and many quite intelligent ones have found Stephen Dedalus and Serenus Zeitblom thoroughly reliable and have felt justified in assuming a close sympathetic relationship between the author, his central character, and the point of view through which the tale is represented, especially since that point of view appears to be what the story is primarily about. Many readers have shared Thomas Merton's penitent response to the third chapter of Joyce's Portrait, have sided with the harsh wisdom of Thrasymachus against the pedantic humanism of Socrates, and have said "stay, thou art so fair" to many of the attitudes and positions the Hegel of the Phenomenology wants us to regard as way stations on the journey to absolute knowledge. The mimetic method offers the reader a mirror to himself: it is a chance, in watching oneself, to see oneself for the first time, but it always runs the risk of engendering a self-confirming narcissism.

When used in a theoretical work, the mimetic method requires a reader who is not only continually alive to ironic reversals but one who is capable of keeping his understanding of pivotal concepts flexible and suspended until he has experienced the movement of the entire argument. A mimetic work strives to be that which it is about: the attempt is to create a structure of thought which is at all times the expression of a single theoretical idea in one of the necessary stages of its development. Since that is so, nothing less than the movement of the entire work serves to define any of its central concepts. "The whole is all there is." As Hegel argued in the preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, there is no way to summarize the doctrines a mimetic work will propound because no concepts can be set down prior to the work or arrived at outside the process of continuous critique that shapes it. Because it works by dramatizing the limitations of different perspectives, the method subjects all formulations and "definitions" to a process of progressive reinterpretation. Thus it requires a reader possessed with the "negative capability" to restrain the desire for misplaced concreteness and fixed univocal definitions in favor of a movement of reflection which is essentially the search for a genuine beginning and for definitions of a fundamentally different order. Thanks to a shift in intellectual priorities that dates roughly from the time of Kant and Hegel, we are beginning to understand that many of our most important concepts are structures and can only be articulated and grasped by a similar act of understanding. Written in that spirit, The Act of Interpretation employs the mimetic method not merely as a technique, but out of a philosophic necessity — its irony, accordingly, is not merely a principle of style or tone, but an essential dimension of its content.

The primary virtue of the mimetic method lies, of course, in its compression. It is a way of saying through showing that reveals far more than one could state in any other manner. Represented in all of its dramatic immediacy, the virtues and the limitations of positions become apparent, as well as the deep and usually unrecognized bases of their appeal. When Joyce writes the third chapter of Portrait through what is, in effect, the official voice of the Catholic church, showing how that voice structures the consciousness of Stephen Dedalus and his experience at this stage of his development, he epiphanizes both the power and the trap Roman Catholicism represents. A passage such as the following can be read in two opposed ways, both of which are "correct":

His sin, which had covered him from the sight of God, had led him nearer to the refuge of sinners. Her eyes seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail flesh, did not humiliate the sinner who approached her. If ever he was impelled to cast sin from him and to repent the impulse that moved him was the wish to be her knight. (Portrait [New York: Viking Press, 1964], p. 105)

We have here a perfect depiction of Stephen's spiritual state seen through the language of Catholicism, the kind of language one encounters again and again in devotional writing, even in writers like Chesterton, Belloc, and Mauriac. That language coincides with Stephen's viewpoint at this stage of his development, as do the other styles used in the course of the book. We can assent to the description, as we do, and I think are meant to do, in our initial reading of the work, or we can cast a cold ironic eye upon it. By the time we reach a passage like the following, however, the ironic perspective should have assumed command:

He knelt to say his penance, praying in a corner of the dark nave: and his prayers ascended to heaven from his purified heart like perfume streaming upwards from a heart of white rose. (Portrait, p.145)

Once one understands the intricate structure of Portrait and has experienced, for example, the point-for-point ironic parallel between Stephen's commission of the seven deadly sins at the beginning of chapter 3 and his repetition of precisely the same sins in his effort at "spiritual" purification at the beginning of chapter 4 — Joyce's method of subjecting all experiences to ironic redefinition has become the dominant fact about the book — but that fact exists always as prelude to a more perceptive rereading. For Joyce is not simply giving the devil his due in chapter 3. While the chapter is one of the great representations of Catholicism as the model for totalitarian propaganda — and a great act of ironic liberation from that language — it is also a confession of the profound power of Catholicism's aesthetic appeal and a recognition of the deep human needs it satisfies. We are not meant to choose among these readings: chapter 3 of Portrait, and it is one of the simplest examples in the book, incorporates opposed responses, and does so in a rigorous rather than eclectic fashion. Joyce's attitude toward the religion of his youth always remained one of the utmost complexity — and his narrative method is the refusal of all single-mindedness. To be fully understood Portrait has to be read simultaneously from at least two opposed points of view. The rituals of Roman Catholicism as well as its rhetorical and aesthetic appeal address what were for Joyce essential needs of the psyche — and those needs remain integral to Stephen's Bildungsroman. Joyce never simply cancels anything. He performs, instead, the far more complex act of Aufhebung, canceling, preserving, and uplifting the essential forms of human experience that are structured by Catholic ritual. As many have noted, Stephen's aesthetic creed (and in this case Joyce's also) is the secular equivalent of Catholicism and preserves the ritual needs and modes of experience the church once fulfilled by relocating those structures in the world.

The virtues of the mimetic method imply its inherent pitfalls. Carried away by their identification with what is represented, flattered by what was intended as parody, many readers find themselves confirmed in that from which the method was meant to distance them. Which is why a man like Thomas Merton could, with some justice, read the third chapter of Portrait as one of the essential experiences on his way to Rome, yet why we read Merton's account of his conversion, and of Joyce's place in it, as a droll return to a language, and ipso facto a stage of experience, which Joyce has liberated us from through his irony. (See The Seven Storey Mountain [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948], pt. 2, chap. 1.) It is also why Wayne Booth is in one sense correct in his strictures against the lack of clear focus and direction he finds implicit in Joyce's narrative method, for Joyce's method both depends on the natural responses of the reader and subjects those responses to a continuous ironic critique. Contrary to the alternatives Booth proposes, Portrait must have it both ways.

Many readers, finding themselves the subject of ironic representation, are flattered rather than appalled. That risk is implicit in the method because the dramatization — or immanent critique — of ideas, attitudes, and "habits of mind and feeling" involves the reader in a way other kinds of writing do not. Indeed, the method recognizes misinterpretation as perhaps the reader's deepest need. Yet who would have things any other way? Knowledge is a difficult acquisition, dependent on painful reversals. If the Socratic method initially threatens to paralyze us when it abruptly turns us around, that is because it requires that we discover we are most in the cave when we think we are seeing most clearly. It is a dangerous, by definition a precarious, method, yet as Hegel argues it is the only method which is in fact organically one with its subject, the only method where form and content, the act of philosophizing and the content of philosophy, are joined in a way that is adequate to both the process and the nature of self-critical or reflective knowing.

The description of Joyce's method is, of course, a comment on my own. And as in Joyce, the irony is most intense and most revealing when experienced at the primary level of language. "Can you procure me a copy of the document?" The man who uses a word like procure rather than get has not refined his perception or purified the dialect of the tribe. He has embraced a corpse of dead language, the language of the generalized or socialized other, the language of a class expressing in its speech the contradictions of that class. It is a language of bad faith, the language of a man playing at being educated. But once one sees it as such, how can one make any statement that will not be an unconscious parody of itself? Isn't any attempt to criticize language simply a further instance of it? In a recent interview, Roland Barthes remarked that he talked about nothing but language because nothing disgusted him as much as language. In a similar spirit Adrian Leverkühn in Mann's Doctor Faustus asked, "Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody?" Joyce's revolutionary idea (an idea shared in different ways by Hegel, the Marx of Das Kapital, Wittgenstein, and Mann) was that one could do a critique of language — and thereby extend language beyond its previous boundaries — by using existing language in such a way that its inadequacies called attention to themselves. It is an idea that should be kept in mind while reflecting on The Act of Interpretation.

In an earlier time the mimetic method may have asked too much of the reader. The continued failure of commentators to appreciate the dramatic complexity of Plato's dialogues as a complexity integral to his thought, and not merely a rhetorical device, is a case in point. But ours is the age of ironic discourse. Few notions are as prized by modern critics as irony, and when we read literature most of us find it everywhere. We are deeply attuned to a distance between the author and his characters or personae, the author and his style, the author and his narrative method. We prize ironic art because it answers our demand for a refined sensibility capable of making, in an orderly and progressive way, the infinite qualifications and discriminations that constitute a mature experience of the world. Isn't it about time we brought the same acts of intelligence into the house of criticism itself?