The tour de force of the latest They Might Be Giants album (Apollo 18) is a quintessentially post-modern ditty called "Fingertips", supposedly inspired by those commercials for K-tel records: snatches of a score of songs fit one atop another into a few minutes. Listening to it continues to reduce me into fits of hysterical laughter but thinking much about it continues to make me extremely uneasy. I have been thinking for some time, and in a number of contexts, about a particular description of the genius composer Adrian Leverkuhn in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus as being unable to listen to music without percieving irony or parody. Isn't this based on a story about Mozart? It sounds equally applicable to Joyce. The sense of parody becomes reflected in Keverkuhn's work; consider for example the narrator's treatment of the "symphonic fantasy," Ocean Lights:
"That sound-sparkling Ocean Lights was in my eyes a very remarkable instance of how an artist can give his best to a thing in which he privately no longer believes, insisting on excelling in artistic devices which for his consciousness are already at the point of being worn out ... this disillusioned masterppiece of orchestral brilliance already bore within itself the traits of parody and intellectual mockery of art, which in leverkuhn's later work so often emerged in a creative and uncanny way. Many found it chilling, even repellent and revolting, and these were the better, if not the best sort, who thus judged. All the superficial lot simply called it witty and amusing. In truth parody was here the proud expedient of a great gift threatened with sterility by a combination of skpticism, intellectual reserve, and a sense of the deadly extension of the kingdom of the banal."
I begin to wonder whether post-modernism hasn't made geniuses of us all -- at least as regards our perception -- when considering the practically paranoid frequency with which we have begun to detect or suspect self-parody in the unlikeliest of writers. My own (opposite) urge towards rampant sentimentalism has only made me slightly immune to the tendency to discover cold self-critique absolutely brimming in everything from Chaucer to Virginia Woolf. We are worse than the Yale school trying to prove that all great literature self-deconstructs; my generation seems to be certain that all great literature emphasizes its own smallness. A quote from Leverkuhn:
The work of art? It is a fraud. It is something the burgher wishes there still were. It is contrary to truth, contrary to serious art. Genuine and serious is only the very short, the highly consistent musical moment. ... Pretense and play have the conscience of art against them today. Art would like to stop being pretense and play, it would like to become knowledge.
At the beginning of the 18th century, Swift and Shaftesbury seem to be alternately praising and condemning pretense and play, which they call wit -- first making the distinction between wit and wisdom a utilitarian one -- and then apotheosizing the useless. Is it all just wit? By the end of the 18th century Blake is inventing what I want to call Ironic Allegory: a sort of violent yoking of the chaos (the meaninglessness) all of this would seem to imply with its perfect opposite.
My friend David suggests that Rock and Roll is only justified in striving for any sort of seriousness when it includes an element of self-parody in order to indicate an awareness that it is -- as for the Stones -- only Rock and Roll. Medium is too small for message. Isn't this strikingly parallel to the aesthetic of a Joyce or a Pynchon whose moments of sincerity qua sincerity might best be gauged, once stated, by the force with which they are then degraded? The birth of the novel genre, like that of Rock and Roll, is attended by an awareness of its own limitation as defined (whether rightly or wrongly) on the "losing" side of a high/low culture distinction but redeemed by its ability to speak with passion and sincerity to a popular audience.
"When I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool," writes Nabokov for Kinbote for Shade in Pale Fire -- the same joke They Might Be Giants hits relentlessly proudly weeping "And I walk along darkened corridors" over and over towards the end of "Fingertips". The possibility of sincerity is the suspect notion. My sense is that in the three great works of Ironic Allegory -- Melville's The Confidence Man, Joyce's Ulysses, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow -- it is still only suspect. Their writers, like Leverkuhn, turn from a despair of representation into mathamatical obsessions with form that (irony of ironies, not to mention critical commonplace) sincerely if self-effacedly communicates its despair of incommunication. I find the same in Robert Hass' Meditation at Lagunitas. But is it anything new to suggest taht it is exactly the conjunction of irony and allegory that makes such meaning possible? Kierkegaard suggests in The Concept of Irony (which I have only just begun) that irony can facilitate moments of transfiguration which demonstrate the presence of "divine fullness" -- might allegory be the mediator that can order such fullness into a language of even personal meaning (even sincerity) or seriousness in an age after deconstruction -- a language not yet begun to be exhausted by its few existing manifestations?
Biography has a new athuority: where the great work of art was formerly attributed sincerity as an implication of the toil of its production, now only a great life (because of what is at risk) has this authority of sincerity; but the Ironic Allegory strives to merge a set of personal (that is to say, biographical) as well as archetypal mythologies in order to appropriate such authority.