Whereas Kant and his followers believe that all of the noumena is structured into the phenomena through the mind of the perceiver (primary/secondary imagination), Schlegel, writing soon after Kant, suggests that the noumena is not structured at all. What is out there is fluidity and chaos which is abundant and positive.
It inspires the perceiving mind to engage it in at least two very different ways but always keeping both in mind:
The desire to create order: the search for a stable self-realized in the deliberate attempt to impose order on chaos. This has been called “being“.
In literary studies, often related to constructing a fictional/poetic reality that is stable, in that it is an experience we all agree to accept as “real”: Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”
2. Entering chaos: the experience of freedom from old systems that have been imposed upon you. This has been called Becoming. Mediated by the simultaneous awareness of both potential and limits.
In literary studies, romantic irony is also connected to the moment’s in the text where the writer acknowledges that fictive world, thus breaking the allusion and calling attention to the creative work of the author.
Romantic Irony: There is no choosing between being and becoming; they always stand next to each other; movement between the two is the ideal.
In order for the artistic text to convey Romantic Irony it is necessarily contradictory on at least two levels:
1. The character/narrator himself/herself is shown moving between being and becoming
i.e. the “rider” “weed” imagery of [III: 2, 1] and in many ways it’s the imagery of the “ocean” [not the lake; a metaphor for the chaotic world of the noumena] which best suits Byron’s system.
It both carries man along as a weed and yet the ocean is also the “horse” ridden by the ironic poet. He is both mastered and mastered; simultaneously acknowledging the twin nature of “being and becoming”
2. Because language is in and of itself a structure imposed on the “chaos” which is all potential, ironic texts always call attention to the arbitrary quality of language even as it is employed as a structuring device
i.e. the constantly shifting “definition” of what poetry is and what it can achieve
Is it “Lightning”? [97, 17] Or is it merely a shoring up of limited human powers? [112, 19] “a harmless wile”
Byron’s narrator is also always calling attention to the ways in which his synthetic attempts fall apart; the structure only holds for a moment. For example, the movement between stanzas 6 and 7.
Definition: “A way of thinking about the world which embodies change and process for their own sake” (from Anne Mellor’s British Romantic Irony).
Romantic Irony conceives of the world as chaotic but also endlessly fertile; offers up endless possibility — think here in terms of the scope of Harold’s Pilgrimage, both geographically and psychologically, as well as the scope of the speaker’s thought processes (movement between Harold and “Byron” in the poem; war vs. peace; the things of nature vs. manmade structures; the endurance of nature vs. the endurance of the works of the poet, novelist, and historian; the “child of the imagination” vs. the “child of his blood”).
Canto III, breakdown of speaker/poet vs. Harold
Speaker Stanzas
Poet 1-46
Harold 47-51
Poet 52-55
Harold Lyric: “The Castled Crags of Drachenfels”
Poet 56-118