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Published in Literary Review of Canada , June, 1994
Chapter Three
Linda Hutcheon (1991) observes that irony underlies the English Canadian pysche, and is a perennial feature of Canadian art and literature. She expressly excludes romantic irony from her discussion, which-with its emphasis on anarchic self-consciousness-is more characteristic of American culture. Interestingly, Hegel in the Aesthetics (1975) found romantic irony with its focus on indecision and alienation, inadequate to the creation of genuine art. Yet I think Hegel was the most ironic of philosophers, and this explains his peculiar attraction for Canadians. After all, as Irving Layton suggests, "A Canadian is a born sucker for anything that will tie [her] up in knots" (quoted in Hutcheon 1991: 337).
We have already seen that Canada is a country of doubleness, which-as Linda Hutcheon avers-is a chief characteristic of irony. "Irony depends on some significant difference: a disparity, contrast, opposition, contradiction or incompatibility" (1991: 342, 337). As Hutcheon suggests, the ironic stance is an aspect of marginality, a condition as relevant to Hegel as to Canadian thinkers today. She contends that irony is simultaneously subversive and authorizing, undercutting and excluding. It "disrupts any notions of meaning as single, stable, decidable, complete, closed, innocent, or transparent." All this relates to Hegel, whose writings are notoriously open to interpretation, fluid, self-referring, circular, and so forth. The Philosophy of Right, for example, can be seen as a text authorizing the Prussian regime-as Karl Popper aw it. Alternatively, it can be interpreted as a revolutionary critique of the existing system, which is my own view. A central argument of my Hegel, Marx, and the English State is that Hegel was writing for many audiences, a primary one being the Prussian secret police-and this official audience in particular had a defining effect of Hegel's prose style, imbuing it with many levels of irony.
Irony involves secrets, and hidden meanings suddenly revealed. Much commentary on Hegel-and not only that by Canadians-reflects on his cryptic, mysterious style. The first serious study of Hegel in English, for example, a work by Stirling, was called The Secret of Hegel. The noted French Hegel scholar Jacques D'Hondt claimed recently in Hegel in His Time (1988) that Hegel is still in hiding.
Hutcheon (1991:334) quotes Gaile McGregor's definition of irony in The Wacousta Syndrome (1985). "Nothing is ironic," writes McGregor, "unless it is juxtaposed with a countering ideal or at least set against a relatively preferable state of affairs" which does not have to be explicit but "does have to be accessible in terms of the work itself." Canadian commentary on Hegel emphasises the ideal aspect of his politics, not as a reactionary identification of the ideal with the real, but rather as the posing of a better form of life, which contrasts with, and grows from, the existing system.
This interpretation of Hegel bears an interesting similarity with Canada's development. As Hutcheon observes, "the country's very evolution into nationhood, unlike that of the United States, occurred within British institutions. Is this how," she asks, "Canadians came to learn the subversive double-voicing that speaks the language of tradition but implies a second level of meaning that can alter tradition from within?" (Hutcheon 1991:344). |
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