Irony

Irony, in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what on the surface appears to be the case and what is actually the case or to be expected. It typically figures as a rhetorical device and literary technique. In some philosophical contexts, however, it takes on a larger significance as an entire way of life.

Irony has been defined in many different ways, and there is no general agreement about the best way to organize its various types. This does not mean, however, that it is not a topic about which a great deal can be meaningfully said.

Etymology

'Irony' comes from the Greek eironeia (εἰρωνεία). It was was initially synonymous with lying. In Plato's dialogues, however, it came to acquire a new sense of "an intended simulation which the audience or hearer was meant to recognise".^[1] More simply put, it came to acquire the general definition, "the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect".^[2]

It entered the English language as a figure of speech in the 16th century with a meaning similar to the French ironie, itself derived from the Latin ironia.^[3]

Until the Renaissance, ironia was considered a part of rhetoric, usually a species of allegory, along the lines established by Cicero and Quintilian. With the rediscovery of the Greek texts, however, the term expanded to become "a figure that could charaterise an entire personality".^[4]

The problem of definition

It is commonplace to begin a study of irony with the acknowledgement that the term quite simply eludes any single definition.^[5][6][7] Philosopher Richard J. Bernstein opens his Ironic Life with the observation that a survey of the literature on irony leaves the reader with the "dominant impression" that "these authors are talking about different subjects".^[8]

Henry Watson Fowler writes in The King's English, "any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same." A consequence of this, he observes, is that an analysis of irony requires the concept of a double audience "consisting of one party that hearing shall hear & shall not understand, & another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more & of the outsiders' incomprehension".^[9]

From this basic feature, literary theorist Douglas C. Muecke identifies three basic characteristics of all irony. First, irony depends on a double-layered or two-story phenomenon for success: "At the lower level is the situation either as it appears to the victim of irony (where there is a victim) or as it is deceptively presented by the ironist."^[10] The upper level is the situation as it appears to the reader or the ironist. Second, the ironist exploits a contradiction, incongruity, or incompatibility between the two levels. Third, irony plays upon the innocence of a character or victim: "Either a victim is confidently unaware of the very possibility of there being an upper level or point of view that invalidates his own, or an ironist pretends not to be aware of it".^[11]

According to Wayne Booth, this uneven double-character of irony makes it a rhetorically complex phenomenon. Admired by some and feared by others, it has the power to tighten social bonds, but also to exacerbate divisions.^[12]

Types of irony

How best to organize irony into distinct types is almost as controversial as how best to define it. There have been many proposals, generally relying on the same cluster of types; still, there is little agreement as to how to organize the types and what if any hierarchical arrangements might exist. Nevertheless, academic reference volumes standardly include at least all of verbal irony, dramatic irony, cosmic irony, and Romantic irony as major types.^{[13][14][15][16]}

Verbal irony

Verbal irony is "a statement in which the meaning that a speaker employs is sharply different from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed".^[17] Moreover, it is produced intentionally by the speaker, rather than being a literary construct, for instance, or the result of forces outside of their control.^[13] Samuel Johnson gives as an example the sentence, "Bolingbroke was a holy man" (he was anything but).^[18]

For this reason, verbal irony is sometimes contrasted with situational irony, that is, irony in which there is no ironist; instead of "he is being ironical" we would instead say "it is ironical that".^[19][20] The application of the term 'irony' to situations in this way is relatively new.^[21]

Verbal irony is sometimes also considered to encompass various other literary devices such as hyperbole and its opposite, litotes, conscious naïveté, and others.^[22][23]

Dramatic irony

Dramatic irony provides the audience with information of which characters are unaware, thereby placing the audience in a position of advantage to recognize their words and actions as counter-productive or opposed to what their situation actually requires.^[24] In this way, it is a form of situational irony. Tragic irony is a specific type of dramatic irony.^[25]

Three stages may be distinguished — installation, exploitation, and resolution (often also called preparation, suspension, and resolution) — producing dramatic conflict in what one character relies or appears to rely upon, the contrary of which is known by observers (especially the audience, sometimes to other characters within the drama) to be true.^[26]

Cosmic irony

Cosmic irony, sometimes also called "the irony of "fate", presents agents as always ultimately thwarted by forces beyond human control. It is strongly associated with the works of Thomas Hardy.^[24][25] It is another form of situational irony.^[21]

This form of irony is also given metaphysical significance in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, among other philosophers.^[27]

Romantic irony

Romantic irony is closely related to cosmic irony, and sometimes the two terms are treated interchangeably.^[20] Romantic irony is distinct, however, in that it is author who assumes the role of the cosmic force. The narrator in Tristam Shandy is one early example.^[28] The term is closely associated with Friedrich Schlegel and the early German Romantics, and in their hands it assumed a metaphysical significance similar to cosmic irony in the hands of Kierkegaard.^[20] It was also of central importance to the literary theory advanced by New Criticism in mid-20th century.^[28][23]

Another typology

Building upon the double-level structure of irony, self-described "ironologist" D. C. Muecke proposes another, complimentary way in which we may typify, and so better understand, ironic phenomena. What he proposes a dual distinction between and among three grades and four modes of ironic utterance.

Three grades of irony

Grades of irony are distinguished "according to the degree to which the real meaning is concealed". Muecke names them overt, covert, and private.^[29]

In overt irony, the true meaning is clearly apparent to both parties, and the only thing that makes the utterance ironic is the "blatancy" of the "contradiction or incongruity". Those instances of sarcasm that may be classified as ironic are overt. Muecke notes that this form of irony has a short half-life; what is obvious to everyone quickly loses its rhetorical effect with repetition.^[29]

Covert irony is "intended not to be seen but detected". The ironist feigns ignorance to achieve the intended effect, and so there is a real danger that it simply goes by unnoticed. This means that a comparatively larger rhetorical context is in play. This may involve, for instance, assumptions about prior knowledge, the ability of someone to detect an incongruity between what is being said and the manner in which it is said, or the perspicuity of the audience in spotting an internal contradiction in the content of the message.^[30]

Private irony is not intended to be perceived at all. It is entirely for the internal satisfaction of the ironist. Muecke cites as an example Mr. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, who "enjoys seeing his wife or Mr Collins take his remarks at face value; that is to say, he enjoys the irony of their being impervious to irony".^[31]

Four modes of irony

Muecke's typology of modes are distinguished "according to the kind of relationship between the ironist and the irony". He calls these impersonal irony, self-disparaging irony, ingénue irony, and dramatized irony.^[29]

Impersonal irony is distinguished by deadpan blankness of the ironist, a sort of affected graveness or poker-face.^[32] It is associated with 'dry humor' quite generally, but also encompasses more specific ironic postures such as 'pretend agreement with the ironic victim', 'false ignorance', 'understatement', 'overstatement', and many other familiar forms of ironic utterance.^[33]

Self-disparaging irony is distinguished by the introduction of the personality of the ironist, often with a somewhat performative dimension. This, however, is intended to be transparent, and is done in the service of directing irony against another object. For instance, when Socrates laments his misfortune of having a poor memory, the object of his irony is the overly long speech made by the fictionalized Protagoras in Plato's dialogue; his memory, we are to understand, is perfectly fine.^[34]

Ingénue irony is distinguished by an assumed ignorance that is intended to be convincing. The canonical example is The Emperor's New Clothes. Another example is the Fool in King Lear. Muecke writes, "the effectiveness of this kind of irony comes from its economy of means: mere common sense or even simple innocence or ignorance may suffice" to break through the targeted hypocrisy or foolishness of received ideas.^[35]

Dramatized irony is the simple presentation of ironic situations for the enjoyment of an audience. The ironist remains out of sight. The novels of Gustave Flaubert are among the many literary examples of this technique. Muecke notes an increase in this type of irony beginning in the latter half of the eighteenth century when, he says, "irony began to be attended to for its intrinsic interest and delight".^[36]

General irony, or "irony as a way of life"

Typically "irony" is used, as described above, with respect to some specific act or situation–literary, historical, or otherwise. In more philosophical contexts, however, the term is sometimes assigned a more general significance, in which it is used to describe an entire way of life or a universal truth about the human situation. In these contexts, what is expressed rhetorically by cosmic irony is ascribed existential or metaphysical significance. This usage has its origins primarily in the work of Friedrich Schlegel and other members of early 19th-century German Romanticism and in Søren Kierkegaard's analysis of Socrates in The Concept of Irony.^[37][38]

Socratic irony

Socratic irony is "the dissimulation of ignorance practised by Socrates as a means of confuting an adversary".^[39] Socrates would pretend to be ignorant of the topic under discussion, to draw out the inherent nonsense in the arguments of his interlocutors. The Chambers Dictionary defines it as "a means by which a questioner pretends to know less than a respondent, when actually he knows more".

Zoe Williams of The Guardian wrote: "The technique [of Socratic irony], demonstrated in the Platonic dialogues, was to pretend ignorance and, more sneakily, to feign credence in your opponent's power of thought, in order to tie him in knots."^[40]

A more modern example of Socratic irony can be seen on the American crime fiction television series, Columbo. The character Lt. Columbo is seemingly naïve and incompetent. His untidy appearance adds to this fumbling illusion. As a result, he is underestimated by the suspects in murder cases he is investigating. With their guard down and their false sense of confidence, Lt. Columbo is able to solve the cases, leaving the murderers feeling duped and outwitted.^[41] Like Socrates, Columbo routinely encourages the suspect to explain the situation, follows their logic aloud for himself, then arrives at a contradiction. He then insists he is confused and asks the suspect to help him understand, with the suspect's subsequent attempt to amend the contradiction revealing further evidence or contradictions.

Irony as infinite, absolute negativity

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and others, saw irony, such as that used by Socrates, as a disruptive force with the power to undo texts and readers alike.^[42] The phrase itself is taken from Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, and is applied by Kierkegaard to the irony of Socrates. This tradition includes 19th-century German critic and novelist Friedrich Schlegel ("On Incomprehensibility"), Charles Baudelaire, Stendhal, and the 20th century deconstructionist Paul de Man ("The Concept of Irony"). In Kierkegaard's words, from On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates:

[Socratic] irony [is] the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not. The irony established nothing, because that which is to be established lies behind it...^[43]

Where much of philosophy attempts to reconcile opposites into a larger positive project, Kierkegaard and others insist that irony—whether expressed in complex games of authorship or simple litotes—must, in Kierkegaard's words, "swallow its own stomach". Irony entails endless reflection and violent reversals, and ensures incomprehensibility at the moment it compels speech. Similarly, among other literary critics, writer David Foster Wallace viewed the pervasiveness of ironic and other postmodern tropes as the cause of "great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists [ironies] pose terrifically vexing problems".^[44]

Overlap with rhetorical irony

Referring to earlier self-conscious works such as Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, Douglas Muecke points particularly to Peter Weiss's 1964 play, Marat/Sade. This work is a play within a play set in a lunatic asylum, in which it is difficult to tell whether the players are speaking only to other players or also directly to the audience. When The Herald says, "The regrettable incident you've just seen was unavoidable indeed foreseen by our playwright", there is confusion as to who is being addressed, the "audience" on the stage or the audience in the theatre. Also, since the play within the play is performed by the inmates of a lunatic asylum, the theatre audience cannot tell whether the paranoia displayed before them is that of the players, or the people they are portraying. Muecke notes that, "in America, Romantic irony has had a bad press", while "in England […] [it] is almost unknown."^[45]

In a book entitled English Romantic Irony, Anne Mellor writes, referring to Byron, Keats, Carlyle, Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll:^[46]

Romantic irony is both a philosophical conception of the universe and an artistic program. Ontologically, it sees the world as fundamentally chaotic. No order, no far goal of time, ordained by God or right reason, determines the progression of human or natural events […] Of course, romantic irony itself has more than one mode. The style of romantic irony varies from writer to writer […] But however distinctive the voice, a writer is a romantic ironist if and when his or her work commits itself enthusiastically both in content and form to a hovering or unresolved debate between a world of merely man-made being and a world of ontological becoming.

Similarly, metafiction is: "Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions (esp. naturalism) and narrative techniques."^[47] It is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, thereby exposing the fictional illusion.

Gesa Giesing writes that "the most common form of metafiction is particularly frequent in Romantic literature. The phenomenon is then referred to as Romantic Irony." Giesing notes that "There has obviously been an increased interest in metafiction again after World War II."^[48]

For example, Patricia Waugh quotes from several works at the top of her chapter headed "What is metafiction?". These include:

The thing is this. That of all the several ways of beginning a book […] I am confident my own way of doing it is best

— Tristram Shandy

Since I've started this story, I've gotten boils […]

— Ronald Sukenick, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories^[49]

Additionally, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction says of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, "For the first twelve chapters...the reader has been able to immerse him or herself in the story, enjoying the kind of 'suspension of disbelief' required of realist novels...what follows is a remarkable act of metafictional 'frame-breaking'". As evidence, chapter 13 "notoriously" begins: "I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. […] if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense".^[50]

Related phenomena

Awkwardness

The 1990s saw a cultural expansion of the definition of irony from "saying what one doesn't mean" into a "general stance of detachment from life in general",^[51] this detachment serves as a shield against the awkwardness of everyday life.

The generation of people in the United States who grew up in the 1990s, Millennials, are seen as having this same sort of detachment from serious or awkward situations in life, as well. Hipsters are thought to use irony as a shield against those same serious or genuine confrontations.^[52]

Sarcasm

A fair amount of confusion has surrounded the issue of the relationship between verbal irony and sarcasm. For instance, various reference sources assert the following:

• "Sarcasm does not necessarily involve irony and irony has often no touch of sarcasm".^[53]
• Irony: "A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt".^[54]
• "Non-literary irony is often called sarcasm".^[55]
• Sarcasm: "1 : a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain. 2 a : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual".^[56]
• "Irony must not be confused with sarcasm, which is direct: sarcasm means precisely what it says, but in a sharp, caustic, ... manner".^[57]

The psychologist Rod A. Martin, in The Psychology of Humour (2007), is quite clear that irony is where "the literal meaning is opposite to the intended" and sarcasm is "aggressive humor that pokes fun".^[58] He has the following examples: for irony he uses the statement "What a nice day" when it is raining. For sarcasm, he cites Winston Churchill, who is supposed to have said, when told by Bessie Braddock that he was drunk, "But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still be ugly", as being sarcastic, while not saying the opposite of what is intended.

Psychology researchers Lee and Katz have addressed the issue directly. They found that ridicule is an important aspect of sarcasm, but not of verbal irony in general. By this account, sarcasm is a particular kind of personal criticism levelled against a person or group of persons that incorporates verbal irony. For example, a woman reports to her friend that rather than going to a medical doctor to treat her cancer, she has decided to see a spiritual healer instead. In response her friend says sarcastically, "Oh, brilliant, what an ingenious idea, that's really going to cure you." The friend could have also replied with any number of ironic expressions that should not be labeled as sarcasm exactly, but still have many shared elements with sarcasm.^[59]

Most instances of verbal irony are labeled by research subjects as sarcastic, suggesting that the term sarcasm is more widely used than its technical definition suggests it should be.^[60] Some psycholinguistic theorists^[61] suggest that sarcasm, hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical questions, double entendre, and jocularity should all be considered forms of verbal irony. The differences between these rhetorical devices (tropes) can be quite subtle and relate to typical emotional reactions of listeners, and the goals of the speakers. Regardless of the various ways theorists categorize figurative language types, people in conversation who are attempting to interpret speaker intentions and discourse goals do not generally identify the kinds of tropes used.^[62]

Misuse of the term

Some speakers of English complain that the words irony and ironic are often misused,^[63] though the more general casual usage of a contradiction between circumstance and expectation originated in the 1640s.^{[64][example  needed]}

Dan Shaughnessy wrote, "We were always kidding about the use of irony. I maintained that it was best never to use the word because it was too often substituted for coincidence. (Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic" cites multiple examples of things that are patently not ironic.)"^[65]

Tim Conley cites the following: "Philip Howard assembled a list of seven implied meanings for the word "ironically", as it opens a sentence:

• By a tragic coincidence
• By an exceptional coincidence
• By a curious coincidence
• By a coincidence of no importance
• You and I know, of course, though other less intelligent mortals walk benighted under the midday sun
• Oddly enough, or it's a rum thing that
• Oh hell! I've run out of words to start a sentence with."^[66]

The term is sometimes used as a synonym for incongruous and applied to "every trivial oddity" in situations where there is no double audience.^[67] An example of such usage is, "Sullivan, whose real interest was, ironically, serious music, which he composed with varying degrees of success, achieved fame for his comic opera scores rather than for his more earnest efforts".^[68]

See also

References

Bibliography

This page was last edited on 10 December 2023, at 14:36