TSAI

COSMIC, TRAGIC OR DRAMATIC IRONY AND EVERYDAY IRONY

Before going on to look at the complexities of literary irony in the following chapters, we can consider the ways in which we use the concept of irony in everyday and non-literary contexts. There are two broad uses in everyday parlance. The first relates to cosmic irony and has little to do with the play of language or figural speech. A Wimbledon commentator may say, ‘Ironically, it was the year that he was given a wild-card entry, and not as a seeded player, that the Croatian won the title.’ The irony here refers, like linguistic irony, to a doubleness of sense or meaning. It is as though there is the course of human events and intentions, involving our awarding of rankings and expectations, that exists alongside another order of fate beyond our predictions. This is an irony of situation, or an irony of existence; it is as though human life and its understanding of the world is undercut by some other meaning or design beyond our powers. It is this form of irony that covers everything from statements such as, ‘Ironically, Australians are spending more than ever on weight-loss formulas while becoming increasingly obese’, to observations like, ‘The film ends ironically, with the music of the young and hopeful cellist played as we see her crippled and wasted body.’ In such cases, the word irony refers to the limits of human meaning; we do not see the effects of what we do, the outcomes of our actions, or the forces that exceed our choices. Such irony is cosmic irony, or the irony of fate.

Related to cosmic irony, or the way the word ‘irony’ covers twists of fate in everyday life, is the more literary concept of dramatic or tragic irony. This is most intense when the audience knows what will happen, so that a character can be viewed from an almost God-like position where we see her at the mercy of the plot or destiny (Sedgwick 1935). If irony is taken in its broadest sense as a doubleness of meaning, where what is said is limited or undercut by what is implied, then we can start to include ironies that are not rhetorical, that have little to do with speech or language. Such ironies were not labelled as ironies until the nineteenth century (Thirlwall 1833, 490), but it is frequently argued that even ancient texts display this mode of irony. Tragic irony is exemplified in ancient drama and is intensified by the fact that most of the plots were mythic. The audience watched a drama unfold, already knowing its destined outcome. There was already a sense of irony or mourning in the predetermined plot, as though the drama could only unfold an already given destiny, as though the time when human action could be open and determining was already lost. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, for example, ‘we’ (the audience) can see what Oedipus is blind to. The man he murders is his father, but he does not know it. In so doing he not only does more than he intends, he also fulfils a destiny that he and the audience have heard at the opening of the play from the prophet Teirisias, but whose meaning only ‘we’ fully hear:

You have your eyes but see not where you are

in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.

Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing

you are an enemy to kith and kin

in death, beneath the earth, and in this life.

A deadly footed, double striking curse,

from father and mother both, shall drive you forth

out of this land, with darkness on your eyes,

that now have such straight vision.

(Sophocles 1942, 128, 413–1 9)

We might say that we can get a sense of this tragic or dramatic irony today, either by the fact that we know the plot of Macbeth and can see Macbeth hurtling towards his end, despite his ambitions, or by the fact that we are aware of the forces of plot and genre (Blissett 1959). In the case of Macbeth we may know the meaning of the witches’ prediction and see Macbeth misinterpret what they say, precisely because he believes too readily in his power to act and determine his own end. But even if we do not know or see the actual plot we can experience a tragic or dramatic irony through the experience of plot as such. We can watch a film, and once we get a sense that its genre is one of tragedy or horror, we can ‘know’ that the central character will meet his end; we can see all his hopes and efforts as ironic. We see that he is blind to what must befall him.

Dramatic, cosmic and tragic irony are ways of thinking about the relation between human intent and contrary outcomes. This sense of irony is related to verbal irony in that both share a notion of a meaning or intent beyond what we manifestly say or intend. In dramatic and cosmic irony this other meaning is plot or destiny. In verbal irony the other meaning is either what the speaker intends or what the hearer understands; but how do we know just what this other meaning is?

On the one hand, we might say that cosmic irony is something we can discern across history, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to modern film, and we might also say the same about verbal irony: that it is always possible for texts to play with contexts and assumptions. On the other hand, we might want to ask why the problem of these modes of irony was made explicit in the nineteenth century.