This is great, as always, but I think it is a bit unfair to Hegel. He dislikes Schlegel’s version of irony, which in his opinion gives so much freedom to the poet’s subjectivity that it fails to latch on to anything in experience. Thus it gets stuck in a resolutely negative attitude towards the world, which Hegel thought was unlivable (he felt that Schlegel’s eventual conversion to Catholicism refuted his original position). Hegel is implicitly contrasting Schlegel’s disciples among the romantics with Goethe, whom Hegel thinks had arrived at a more objective version of irony that bridges the gap between artist and world.
ofc Hegel in the Aesthetics is adopting Goethe’s position in a polemical quarrel with romanticism. Both Hegel and Goethe actually owed the Schlegels a lot, in a way they tried to minimize after everybody fell out in the early 1800s. In a sense the history of romanticism is the history of Goethe—among his other distinctions, one of the great university presidents—hiring a bunch of post-Kantian philosophers to explain his own poetry to him. (He'd started as a left-wing, Rousseau influenced Spinozist but he felt challenged by Kant.) Schelling had claimed that art was the cannon of transcendental philosophy, with Goethe implicitly cast as the defining poet of the new age of freedom launched by the French Revolution and Kant’s philosophy; A. W. Schlegel developed this suggestion into a systematic history of all the arts in a set of lectures, basically an effort to tease out the view of the history of art implied in Wilhelm Meister and Faust: A Fragment; Schelling and Hegel then wrote their own lectures inspired by A. W.’s; Mme. de Stäel and Coleridge then plagiarized these lectures and got romanticism started outside of Germany.
Thanks for this! I'm not a philosopher or a Germanist, so it's very helpful. All I'll say in my defense is that I received Hegel's critique through contemporary Marxist polemics against modernism and postmodernism, which to my mind amounted to little better than neo-Stalinism, thus I retain a certain knee-jerk resistance I should strive to overcome!
I'm worried that my spiritual street cred is being eroded by the fact that I've now religiously attended three local Quaker meetings in a row, but the short version of the argument is that both can offer individual non-geniuses a way to be good, if approached with the proper degree of irony, of course.
Also, "digressive and morbid" would make an excellent slogan on a T-shirt or a baseball cap, if you ever go back to your petit bourgeois roots and open a Grand Hotel Abyss merch store.
Exactly. I thought about bringing up Megalopolis, but worried it might undermine my case with some people as it's possibly too far in the other direction from The Brutalist!
To build on the absolutely joyous debut episode of the second season of IC, we anger the gods when we attempt to reverse-engineer a masterpiece. Corbet aimed to make "The Godfather," but we must remember one of the medium's supreme ironies: Coppola didn’t even want to make "The Godfather"! He only wanted to "make" a quick buck to fund "The Conversation."
The moment we see the monstrous, canted, inverted Statue of Liberty—what if, dare I say, she weren’t a radiant Calliope of freedom but instead a tarnished siren luring our weary traveler to his doom?—I knew from a mile away where this thing was headed. And the ending was, by God, a mile away.
Anyway, I'll say two things in its favour: the score was extremely affecting, I felt, and it did remind me that I need to finally read Naipaul's "The Enigma of Arrival."
Agreed on both counts! (I need to read anything by Naipaul, frankly, but that one has the best title.) Truly excellent score.
(This is self-serving, but your divine precept is actually one of the reasons MA is so digressive. I didn't want to give it the droning tone of a work totally and monumentally calculated, so I deliberately risked improvisation, play, quick shifts of mood, the irruption of the odd irrelevancy. Of course this leads to the paradox of a calculated lack of calculation...)
To your point about the measured digressiveness of "MA," it’s also why your "needle drop," if we can call your Q.E.D. that, works so well. It properly bookends the novel, framing its luminous, wandering middle with moments of arcane lucidity. Where whatever’s left standing in "The Brutalist" irrevocably collapses with its snide, end-credits 70s Italian disco track—a leering wink that deflates, rather than expands, the non-negotiable statement to which its epilogue aimed—your Q.E.D. transforms from the bullet-piercing finality of a proof into an exalted clash of ordered beauty wrestling with nature’s chaotic flux, immortal art to whither conclusion and weather contradiction’s rough storms.
"I must briefly take exception to this critic’s implication that only people who already love comic books will enjoy the novel" - definitely not true in my case. Hell, I'm so ignorant of this stuff that I thought Major Arcana was a military rank, superior to Captain Arcana and subordinate to Lt. Col. Arcana. But I liked the book anyway.
Thanks, I didn't know that. According to the article I just read, they used AI to design the buildings to save money—when the hero's whole conflict with his patron in the movie is about the latter perverting the former's vision to save money! I'm not absolutely opposed to AI use in art, but in this case it really goes against the film's whole proudly proclaimed ethos. It would only count as irony if they discussed it *in the movie*, though. It could have been the epilogue to the epilogue and added another half hour on.
Brilliant work as always, John. My only slight quarrel is that valourizing Schlegel's vision of literature's permanent parabasis perhaps leads too quickly (and I know this isn't your aim) to the deathliness and paralysis of de Man's hyperascestic view of literature. Your indictment of Hegel for missing Schlegel's emphasis on irony's passion, though, reminds me of Bloom's rejoinder to de Man that he was trying to put pathos back into tropes. Appreciating (with a nod to Pater) the pathos of permanent parabasis avoids the alienated sense of aesthetic experience as awaiting death and so, I think, opens up a crooked space between idealism and deconstruction. This occurs via the question Bloom asks about why we listen to one liar over the other, which recalls the sense of individuality Schlegel still finds in the all-encompassing presence of irony. That is all to say what I find the most valuable in art is the poet's personality (their strangeness) evinced through, but not despite, the dispersing forces of irony. Such an experience of individuation is more freeing and more vital than one of the end consequences of Schlegel's philosophy which is a rhetoric that reduces aesthetic experience to the expression of endlessly oscillating tropes proclaiming their failed figuration of knowledge.
Thank you! No, I agree with you—I probably even read de Man before I read Schlegel—and think you're right about the danger that art becomes nothing more than a testament to its own impossibility unless irony is wed to a unique sensibility. In general, irony might be a quality that has to be emphasized or de-emphasized situationally: played up in an era or milieu that calls for didactic art or transparent entertainment or is overly sentimental, played down when something like mere cynicism is the order of the day.
I'm surprised to read that you enjoyed Barney's piece, given your refined taste. His overlong report is so poorly composed, and his prose style makes my eyes water.
This is great, as always, but I think it is a bit unfair to Hegel. He dislikes Schlegel’s version of irony, which in his opinion gives so much freedom to the poet’s subjectivity that it fails to latch on to anything in experience. Thus it gets stuck in a resolutely negative attitude towards the world, which Hegel thought was unlivable (he felt that Schlegel’s eventual conversion to Catholicism refuted his original position). Hegel is implicitly contrasting Schlegel’s disciples among the romantics with Goethe, whom Hegel thinks had arrived at a more objective version of irony that bridges the gap between artist and world.
ofc Hegel in the Aesthetics is adopting Goethe’s position in a polemical quarrel with romanticism. Both Hegel and Goethe actually owed the Schlegels a lot, in a way they tried to minimize after everybody fell out in the early 1800s. In a sense the history of romanticism is the history of Goethe—among his other distinctions, one of the great university presidents—hiring a bunch of post-Kantian philosophers to explain his own poetry to him. (He'd started as a left-wing, Rousseau influenced Spinozist but he felt challenged by Kant.) Schelling had claimed that art was the cannon of transcendental philosophy, with Goethe implicitly cast as the defining poet of the new age of freedom launched by the French Revolution and Kant’s philosophy; A. W. Schlegel developed this suggestion into a systematic history of all the arts in a set of lectures, basically an effort to tease out the view of the history of art implied in Wilhelm Meister and Faust: A Fragment; Schelling and Hegel then wrote their own lectures inspired by A. W.’s; Mme. de Stäel and Coleridge then plagiarized these lectures and got romanticism started outside of Germany.
Thanks for this! I'm not a philosopher or a Germanist, so it's very helpful. All I'll say in my defense is that I received Hegel's critique through contemporary Marxist polemics against modernism and postmodernism, which to my mind amounted to little better than neo-Stalinism, thus I retain a certain knee-jerk resistance I should strive to overcome!
I'm worried that my spiritual street cred is being eroded by the fact that I've now religiously attended three local Quaker meetings in a row, but the short version of the argument is that both can offer individual non-geniuses a way to be good, if approached with the proper degree of irony, of course.
Also, "digressive and morbid" would make an excellent slogan on a T-shirt or a baseball cap, if you ever go back to your petit bourgeois roots and open a Grand Hotel Abyss merch store.
You’re either a Brutalist Boy, or a Megalopolis Man, and never the twain shall meet.
Exactly. I thought about bringing up Megalopolis, but worried it might undermine my case with some people as it's possibly too far in the other direction from The Brutalist!
To build on the absolutely joyous debut episode of the second season of IC, we anger the gods when we attempt to reverse-engineer a masterpiece. Corbet aimed to make "The Godfather," but we must remember one of the medium's supreme ironies: Coppola didn’t even want to make "The Godfather"! He only wanted to "make" a quick buck to fund "The Conversation."
The moment we see the monstrous, canted, inverted Statue of Liberty—what if, dare I say, she weren’t a radiant Calliope of freedom but instead a tarnished siren luring our weary traveler to his doom?—I knew from a mile away where this thing was headed. And the ending was, by God, a mile away.
Anyway, I'll say two things in its favour: the score was extremely affecting, I felt, and it did remind me that I need to finally read Naipaul's "The Enigma of Arrival."
Agreed on both counts! (I need to read anything by Naipaul, frankly, but that one has the best title.) Truly excellent score.
(This is self-serving, but your divine precept is actually one of the reasons MA is so digressive. I didn't want to give it the droning tone of a work totally and monumentally calculated, so I deliberately risked improvisation, play, quick shifts of mood, the irruption of the odd irrelevancy. Of course this leads to the paradox of a calculated lack of calculation...)
To your point about the measured digressiveness of "MA," it’s also why your "needle drop," if we can call your Q.E.D. that, works so well. It properly bookends the novel, framing its luminous, wandering middle with moments of arcane lucidity. Where whatever’s left standing in "The Brutalist" irrevocably collapses with its snide, end-credits 70s Italian disco track—a leering wink that deflates, rather than expands, the non-negotiable statement to which its epilogue aimed—your Q.E.D. transforms from the bullet-piercing finality of a proof into an exalted clash of ordered beauty wrestling with nature’s chaotic flux, immortal art to whither conclusion and weather contradiction’s rough storms.
"I must briefly take exception to this critic’s implication that only people who already love comic books will enjoy the novel" - definitely not true in my case. Hell, I'm so ignorant of this stuff that I thought Major Arcana was a military rank, superior to Captain Arcana and subordinate to Lt. Col. Arcana. But I liked the book anyway.
Thank you!
I’ve not seen the Brutalist, but can it really be that devoid of irony when generative AI was used to design some of the buildings?
Thanks, I didn't know that. According to the article I just read, they used AI to design the buildings to save money—when the hero's whole conflict with his patron in the movie is about the latter perverting the former's vision to save money! I'm not absolutely opposed to AI use in art, but in this case it really goes against the film's whole proudly proclaimed ethos. It would only count as irony if they discussed it *in the movie*, though. It could have been the epilogue to the epilogue and added another half hour on.
Well this news just came out yesterday — surely this calls for an extended edition!
Brilliant work as always, John. My only slight quarrel is that valourizing Schlegel's vision of literature's permanent parabasis perhaps leads too quickly (and I know this isn't your aim) to the deathliness and paralysis of de Man's hyperascestic view of literature. Your indictment of Hegel for missing Schlegel's emphasis on irony's passion, though, reminds me of Bloom's rejoinder to de Man that he was trying to put pathos back into tropes. Appreciating (with a nod to Pater) the pathos of permanent parabasis avoids the alienated sense of aesthetic experience as awaiting death and so, I think, opens up a crooked space between idealism and deconstruction. This occurs via the question Bloom asks about why we listen to one liar over the other, which recalls the sense of individuality Schlegel still finds in the all-encompassing presence of irony. That is all to say what I find the most valuable in art is the poet's personality (their strangeness) evinced through, but not despite, the dispersing forces of irony. Such an experience of individuation is more freeing and more vital than one of the end consequences of Schlegel's philosophy which is a rhetoric that reduces aesthetic experience to the expression of endlessly oscillating tropes proclaiming their failed figuration of knowledge.
Thank you! No, I agree with you—I probably even read de Man before I read Schlegel—and think you're right about the danger that art becomes nothing more than a testament to its own impossibility unless irony is wed to a unique sensibility. In general, irony might be a quality that has to be emphasized or de-emphasized situationally: played up in an era or milieu that calls for didactic art or transparent entertainment or is overly sentimental, played down when something like mere cynicism is the order of the day.
Congrats on finding a publisher for your serialized novel. I'll look forward to ordering a copy.
Thank you—I hope you enjoy it!
I'm surprised to read that you enjoyed Barney's piece, given your refined taste. His overlong report is so poorly composed, and his prose style makes my eyes water.
I think it has a lot of personality.