TSAI

DETERMINING IRONY THROUGH VALUE

From the earliest definitions of irony a distinction was made between a verbal and local irony, which was clearly contrary and delimited, and an extended figure of irony which pervades an entire speech, text or personality, such as the figure of Socrates. It is the first form of simple, stable and clearly recognisable irony that formed the basis of definitions and theories of irony from classical times to the eighteenth century, when irony was still defined in Samuel Johnson’s (1709–8 4) dictionary of 1755 as a mode of speech in which the meaning is clearly contrary to the words. Johnson’s example, ‘Bolingbroke is a holy man’, is not essentially ironic or ambiguous. To be read ironically we must know something about Bolingbroke. The fact that, for Johnson, he was obviously not holy allows the irony to confirm what we already know, and what we can safely assume as already known.

Recently, however, greater stress has been placed on irony that is undecidable and on modes of irony that challenge just how shared, common and stable our conventions and assumptions are. Many have argued that our entire epoch, as postmodern, is ironic (Eco 1992; Hassan 1987, 91–2 ; Hutcheon 1994; Mileur 1998; Sim 2002; Wilde 1980). We no longer share common values and assumptions, nor do we believe there is a truth or reason behind our values; we always speak and write provisionally, for we cannot be fully committed to what we say. Usually, this form of postmodern irony is argued to be inherently politically liberating; because no common ground is assumed, a life marked by irony remains open and undetermined (Handwerk 1985; Lang 1988). But the extension of irony from being a local ‘trope’ within an otherwise literal language to characterise life and language in general has also served clearly conservative political tendencies, tendencies that have closed literature off from its political and cultural forces. At the very least, irony is elitist: to say one thing and mean another, or to say something contrary to what is understood, relies on the possibility that those who are not enlightened or privy to the context will be excluded. We might be able to argue that irony is inherently ethical precisely because it prompts us to look at the communal nature of language (Handwerk 1985); but we can also say that it is conservative to assume that there simply is a community. How many readers, today, would find Johnson’s example of irony, ‘Bolingbroke is a holy man’, so clearly ironic as to be exemplary? If we define irony as a clearly recognised figure of speech, then we need to question just how such communities of clear recognition are formed or assumed.

When the American New Critics of the 1940s used irony and paradox as the hallmark of literary and poetic discourse they did so by regarding the text as a self-contained organism. Poems are ironic because they take the words we use in everyday language and give them a richness of meaning. It is not by referring to the world and its conflicts that texts are ironic; the irony lies in the tensions of language. Wordsworth, for example, in the sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, takes the worn-out metaphor of the city as a natural organism and re-injects it with life (Brooks 1947, 4). Everyday language thinks of life in terms of human bodies and daily action. By contrast, Wordsworth takes the present image of life, the city, and describes it in natural rather than urban terms. He does this by showing the city not when it is teeming with life—during the day when it is filled with faceless crowds—but in the solitude of morning: ‘the very houses seem asleep/And all the mighty heart is lying still.’ Here is the irony: the city is at its most human and alive when it can be described as deserted and asleep. For the New Critics, literary sensibility and irony rejuvenate an everyday language that has become worn out because it is everyday (unquestioning, lifeless and mechanical). Irony is essentially, avowedly and positively elitist: it works against common sense, the unrefined intellect and the social use of language (rather than its reflection, complexity and tension). Cleanth Brooks quotes both T.S.Eliot and I.A.Richards to insist on the superior sensibility of the poet:

the poet, the imaginative man, has his particular value in his superior power to reconcile the irrelevant or apparently warring elements of experience. As Eliot has put it, ‘When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience, the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’…[Brooks goes on to quote Richards:]‘…the ordinary man suppresses nine-tenths of his impulses, because he is incapable of managing them without confusion’

(Brooks 1947, 42)

The history of irony’s elitism goes back to its emergence in Greek thought. Not only was irony defined as an art in keeping with an urbane and elevated personality, it was also recognised as practised primarily in sites of political power. Irony, as a trope, is a means of effective persuasion in speeches and therefore already relies on the established speaking position and force of the orator. As a figure or extended mode of thought irony allows the speaker to remain ‘above’ what he says, allowing those members of his audience who share his urbanity to perceive the true sense of what is really meant. This sense of irony’s necessary exclusiveness was reinforced in the twentieth century in Fowler’s Modern English Usage: ‘Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more and of the outsiders’ incomprehension’ (Fowler 1968, 305).

Because of its ambivalent political history, perceived both as a force of liberation and as a mode of elitism, there have been recent attempts to move beyond or redefine irony. If irony means something other than what it says, then this will (according to its supporters) allow language to be liberated from a fixed and stable context. On the other hand, the idea of an other meaning refers irony back to some speaker or original intent, to ideas or a sense that lies outside language. Irony may well be tied up with the long history of Western subjectivism: the idea that behind language, actions, difference and communication there is a ground or subject to be expressed.

For Douglas Muecke, who wrote a book on irony just as ‘deconstruc-tion’ was gaining a foothold as a discernible movement, the acceptance of texts as pure play without grounding sense would lead to the death of irony. He concluded his own book ironically by suggesting that the inability to deal with irony would prove just how empty deconstruction was:

The establishment in recent years in both France and America of Deconstructionist criticism based on a view of writing as, in the words of Jacques Derrida, ‘a structure cut off from any absolute responsibility or from consciousness as ultimate authority’…will probably lead to a recognition of the decreased usefulness to literary criticism of the term ‘irony.’ It seems likely that the usefulness of the term will delay the establishment of Deconstructionism or some related movement.

(Muecke 1982, 101)

Given that neither irony nor deconstruction have withered away we need to recognise the problem of irony. How can there be an other or ironical meaning if all we have are texts? For does not the very notion of ‘meaning’ demand that there is a sense or depth to a text, that there is more to a text than its surface? And if there is this other meaning, and we only know this meaning through what is said explicitly, just what is the nature and location of this meaning? If language is nothing more than a set of conventions and recognised uses, how do we recognise the difference between an ironic and a sincere use? Does the very thought of irony commit us to some linguistic stability and meaning, or does irony problematise and disrupt meaning? It is this problem of discerning the difference between stable meaning with a secure sense, and merely quoted or mentioned words with no clear depth, that will be charted in the following chapters that examine the various theories and values of irony.

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