CONSERVATIVE AND LIBERAL IRONY

I must admit, my own Thomas Mann comparison caught me rather unprepared, since at the time – the comparison was made on the publication of my first book, the novella Barbarian Spring – Mann was only a very vague reference for me, by no means influential on my style. I had read little of his work and associated him with memories of set texts at school, though even these were sparse since I grew up in Switzerland, where, it seems to me, Thomas Mann has never quite arrived, at least in the education system. In any case, despite his having spent several years in the country, which he assured he loved and where he was buried at his express request, the Swiss had never attempted to co-opt him as a Swiss writer. Perhaps his ›Where I am, there is Germany‹ rang rather too loudly in my compatriots’ ears. Instead, then, all the more Gottfried Keller and Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt for me. And then came the Thomas Mann comparison.

Presumably because I feared being asked about it on my upcoming book tour – which did indeed occur quite frequently – and did not want to look a fool, in other words out of vanity, the comparison prompted me to read more Mann, at last. I did so in California, of all places, where I was studying at the time and started work on my second book, the novel Kraft, a book set mainly in that very state, and one in which my reading of Thomas Mann is reflected in the opening section:

What makes this paragraph an epigonic Mannian text, so to speak, is of course not the magician himself finding mention in it, nor my use of parataxis in it and incidentally in the rest of the book – aside from the last chapter, in which Kraft, along with me, loses his European tone and everything else – but my performance of a series of ironic volte-faces in it. Beginning with the concentration of the terms Kraft (meaning strength), seventh day and idly, to the aspect that Kraft is provoked into a grotesquely eclectic listing of European intellectual giants by Donald Rumsfeld – he feels watched by the latter’s portrait – and his talk of Old Europe, all the way to his rejection of Thomas Mann, the self-personification of the German intellectual, whom he dismisses as a »half Californian« only because Kraft himself is on the brink of being beaten down by the Californian character, whereby I, the writer, evade the accusation of the epigonic in one last turnaround, so to speak, by ironizing him in this way and thus distancing myself from him.

More than the long sentences, therefore, it is the use of irony that links me to Mann. Whereby, seeking my own answer to why I felt so drawn to parataxis, to the multiclausal sentence, I came to understand at some point that it is the one – irony – that leads to the other – the long sentence.

»Ah, I write badly! My eagerness to say everything at once,« Mann has his Serenus Zeitblom lament, makes his sentences run over, »hurries them away from the thought they began by intending to express, and makes them seem to rush on and lose it from sight.«² It is the fictitious chronicler of his narrative that he makes doubt his, the author’s, own style. That is of course ironic. Because it is a distanced and masked way of speaking. And it shows very clearly how irony can also serve to protect the self. And there, my eagerness to say everything at once has carried me away; what I meant to explain was why that very eagerness, which finds its aesthetic expression in the rhetorical period, is the outcome of an ironic way of life.³

The ironic individual is a fox, not a hedgehog. The fox knows many things, as Archilochus teaches us, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ironists are aware of the contingency of language and existence. They are interested in the relations of things to their times and the changes to which they are exposed. In general, the passing of time is always on their horizons. Outside of the story and space, there is nothing for them – not the one big thing the hedgehog believes it knows. They know that things can be told one way or another. They do not believe in systems; least of all in closed systems. They enforce the rights of coincidence, they attribute reality to isolated cases. The diversity of perspectives, perceptions, and experiences is overwhelming and undeniable – small wonder the ironist is eager to say everything at once. The excessive periodic sentence is a literary expression of epistemological experiences, ontological convictions, and a reflection of a theory of action. And for someone like Mann, whose takes his first writerly steps – soon resulting in the literary long-distance hike of the Buddenbrooks – in the waning nineteenth century, irony is thus also a response to his epistemological present, a reaction to modernism.⁴ His talk of »conservatism as erotic irony of the mind,« then, appears curious.⁵ But that’s the way with ironists. They can both affirm the spirit of their times and approach it with skepticism. In Odo Marquard, another great German conservative ironist, it is therefore the agent of change that bears the onus of proof. He is cautiously skeptical, on principle, towards the new, and the renewer must prove that the new will be better than the old.⁶

Irony is thus, as we see, political. But is it necessarily conservative, via the diversion of the skepticism that comes along with it? Allow me to passionately disagree, mounting a defense by means of a determinedly different ironic community of thinkers, labelling them with Richard Rorty as liberal ironists. The liberal ironist is an ironist because she – Rorty uses the generic feminine to distinguish his from other concepts of irony – regards her vocabulary as unfinished, constantly distrusting it because she is aware of the contingency of language and has been disappointed by it in the past, prompting her to revise that vocabulary.⁷ Up to this point, conservative ironists also know what Rorty is talking about. Marquard, for instance, indoctrinated in his youth at an elite Nazi school, was disappointed after the war by the language he learned there. He locates this deception as the source of his skepticism, from which his conservatism grows. And we can assume that Thomas Mann, at some point in the 1920s, must have felt deceived and disappointed by his own vocabulary of the Reflections of a Non-Political Man.

The liberal ironist is liberal because she considers cruelty and humiliation the worst things people can do to one another. And because the status quo is cruel and humiliating for some people, the onus of proof does not lie with the renewer. The preserver must prove that the status quo is good enough; not that it is the conceivably best, because the best is of course the enemy of the good, but that it, the existing status, is at least not cruel.⁸

Perhaps a person becomes a liberal ironist because irony befalls her, to begin with, and she then contracts skepticism as a symptom, while in the other case, a person becomes a conservative ironist when gripped by skepticism and reacting to it with irony.

In any case, liberal irony seems to me the more consistent ironic way of life, since the question of cruelty, in its unconditional gravity, creates an always disconcerting distance to one’s own irony, while the conservative ironist risks abusing irony as a shield against the impositions of present-day life, and it thereby degenerating into habitus.

Habitual irony is irony that loses the distance to one’s self in the process of its adoption.

Presumably, the only thing that still makes me flinch when the comparison is made once again is this: the obvious distance between Mann’s ironic writing and the self-image he displayed and staged, a show of bourgeois habitus combined with the gestus of the great writer; a performance that comes across as entirely unironic and triggers a sense of repugnance, which, I fear, clouds my view of Thomas Mann – at least of the Thomas Mann who manifested as a political thinker, at the latest with his 1930 »Appeal to Reason.« The prevention of cruelty will surely have been more important to this man than the choice of the correct pocket square. Perhaps, on the next comparison to Thomas Mann, my fellow ironist and trusted eager-to-say-everything-at-once-beaver, I ought to feel simply flattered, at least if the comparison was intended that way.

1 Lüscher, Jonas. Kraft. Translated by Tess Lewis, New York 2020
2 Doctor Faustus. Translated by Helena Lowe-Porter, New York 1948, 460
3 See Karthaus, Ulrich. Zu Thomas Manns Ironie: Für Odo Marquard zum 26. II. 1988. In Thomas Mann Jahrbuch, 1, Frankfurt a.M. 1988, 89.
4 See Ewen, Jens. Erzählter Pluralismus: Thomas Manns Ironie als Sprache der Moderne. In Thomas-Mann-Studien, vol. 54, Frankfurt a.M. 2017, 12
5 GW VII, 569
6 Marquard, Odo. Ende des Schicksals. In: Idem, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen. Stuttgart 2005, 77
7 Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge 1989
8 A once bitten, twice shy ironist like Odo Marquard would presumably respond that the new is all too frequently worse than the existing, citing as proof all totalitarian ideas of the »New Man.« Such a narrative fails to recognize, however, that the history of human progress is accompanied by a reduction in cruelty. Regression may always occur, of course; Marquard and I would presumably agree on that.