Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections

6: Mimesis and the Twice-told Tale

6    -  “All the world’s a stage” (AsYou Like It, Act 2, scene 7, line 47), declares the melancholy Jacques, whose lines are often cited as testimony to that reverse mimesis whereby life is said to imitate art. Another such pronouncement on life as redundant imitation is spoken by Lewis (“a beardless boy, a cocker’d silken wanton”): “Life is as tedious as a twicetold tale / Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man” (King John, Act 3, scene 4, lines 108–9).1 In his i. Alexander Pope, in his translation of the Odyssey (12.558), echoes Shakespeare: “What so tedious as a twice-told tale?” 1851 preface to Twice-ToldTales (1837), Nathaniel Hawthorne endorses rather than dispels the notion of tedium: his tales “have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade,—the coolness of a meditative habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch. Instead of passion there is sentiment; and, even in what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader’s mind without a shiver” (Complete Writings, 1:liv). As did the venerable Dr. Dryasdust, Sir Walter Scott’s antiquarian alter ego, Hawthorne poses a recluse who rummages through old books and papers, conjuring characters from obscurity and retelling their tales. As many of the romantic writers discovered, the twice-told tale was far from tedious. A second telling, never quite the same as the first, exposes the biases , prejudices, and idiosyncracies of the narrator. But it also challenges the reader to watch for the discrepancies. Indeed, the author may implicate auditors as well as storytellers in the strategy of retelling. The narrator in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” fails to listen to the leechgather tell his story and requires him to tell it three times over. Not the fallible narrator but the fallible auditor also requires the child to repeat her insistent “we are seven.” In “Hartleap Well” the first telling, a tale of a hunter who builds a memorial where he may celebrate his victory in “merriment,” is told from the perspective of Sir Walter, calling for another horse, and yet another as he pursues relentlessly his quarry to that point where the beast finally drops after a thirteen-hour chase. The second telling commences when the poet arrives on a scene of moldered ruin, and a shepherd reveals that Sir Walter’s victorious hunt was an act of cruelty. Friedrich Schlegel’s various pronouncements in the Lyceum and Athenäum fragments have tended to dominate critical discussion on romantic irony. The problem in citing Schlegel occurs when the critic ignores the irony in which Schlegel has couched his account of irony. Lyceum §42, we should recollect, begins with the assertion that “die Philosophie ist die eigentliche Heimat der Ironie.”2 His fragments, true to the genre, are fragmentary. As fragments, their function is provocation rather than definition. Lilian Furst rightly insists that we                                  2. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 2, Lyceum, §42: “Es gibt alte und moderne Gedichte, die durchgängig im Ganzen und überall den göttlichen Hauch der Ironie atmen. Es lebt in ihnen eine wirklich transzendentale Buffonerie. Im Innern, die Stimmung, welche alles übersieht, und sich über alles Bedingte unendlich erhebt, auch über eigne Kunst, Tugend, und Genialität; im Äußern, in der Ausführung die mimische Manier eines gewöhnlichen guten italiänischen Buffo.” must “get away from Schlegel’s cryptic terminology.”3 Before we put that terminology behind us, however, I would like to consider the challenge of the relationships Schlegel has proposed. Philosophic and poetic expression are intimately related because both become vehicles of transcendental irony. Rhetorical irony, Schlegel also explains in Lyceum, §42, is incidental and governs only a particular turn of phrase or juxtaposition of ideas. Transcendental irony, by contrast, pervades the entire exposition . When Schlegel declares that irony is the operative mode of philosophic dialogue, he means that dialogue sustains opposing versions of the truth. The dialogical tensions in poetic expression are bolstered by the external appearance of an earnest mimesis accompanied by an internal awareness of the art and artifice of the whole endeavor. The self-reflexive awareness is not in itself ironic; rather, it becomes ironic by putting on a well-acted show of external conditions...