TSAI

STABLE IRONY AND RECOGNITION

There is, however, a second tradition that celebrates the stability of irony precisely because, far from being disruptive and actively questioning, irony allows us to discern fixed and enduring, and ultimately human, truths. Cicero, as we have seen, was already aware of this tendency in Socratic irony: that it played with language but only in an appeal to some ultimate and pre-rhetorical truth. Many argue that this emphasis on the stability of Socratic irony goes back to Plato and Aristotle (Lang 1988). Socrates can ask questions, dissimulate and create uncertainty in the early dialogues, but the later Platonic texts find him offering ultimate definitions (Nehamas 1998). His personality is neither entirely ironic nor essentially absent and enigmatic; his irony is employed as a method to lead to truth. On this picture, irony would be a figure of speech within language, and language would be ultimately stable, shared and conducive to political recognition rather than disruption.

In the twentieth century most of the material on irony in philosophy and literary theory argued that irony reveals and reinforces shared human assumptions. We recognise irony, it is argued, because we have fixed conventions. Irony is possible when language is used in ways that run against our norms; it thereby brings our norms into focus. We recognise it as irony precisely because what is meant or what is really being said is so obviously not what is manifestly spoken. John Searle, for example, argues that an ironic speech-act does not harbour any hidden or mysterious ‘meaning’, some ineffable truth or enigma above human speech. Meaning is not something that lies behind our words; nor is there a sense or truth that precedes human dialogue. On the contrary, language only works with shared conventions, and when language is not used conventionally or in ways that ‘we’ recognise, we can all clearly see what is really being meant (Searle 1994).

This type of explanation that looks at irony within a stable and shared community of understanding is expressed most explicitly in Wayne Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony (1974). The title is significant. We can have a rhetoric of irony—a theory about its recognition, creation and effects—precisely because irony is a specific type of speech act. Booth, in ways similar to Douglas Muecke’s work on irony, tends to regard any irony that goes further than a literary event, any irony that creates wholesale uncertainty, misrecognition or instability as secondary and, also, as destructive of the inherent decisiveness of irony. The problem reaches its zenith, for Muecke, when poststructuralism argues for a general ‘writing’ freed of all intentions, meanings and contexts:

This separating out of writing as something independent of communication is now becoming widespread. In so far as it amounts to a denial of both mimesis and the relevance of intentionality it may well have been, as I have heard it explained, a translation, on the part of the French intellectual left, of the refus de pouvoir and the distrust of authority and propensity of the French marxists into the terms of literary theory. Be that as it may, any such distinction between writing and communication ipso facto rules out irony as I have defined it. I have taken being ironical to mean transmitting a literal message in such a way or in such a context as to challenge a response in the form of a correct interpretation of one’s intent, the transliteral meaning.

(Muecke 1982, 100)

What is primary is speech that ‘we’ all know and understand. Irony is rhetorical because it is used as a figure or technique to say or convey some other meaning, albeit with greater force, economy or effect. If irony were to become absolute then we would lose the rich value of shared understanding.

Searle, relatively recently, attacked literary critics for treating all texts ironically. Literary critics, he argued, tend to treat all texts as though they were not grounded in stable and recognisable contexts; they tend to see all texts as distanced or divorced from their original intention. This predicament can be solved, Searle argues, through philosophy: if we are made aware of language as a shared and conventional system, then we will not be led into the naive belief that texts are ultimately unstable or undecidable (Searle 1994). Wayne Booth, much earlier, also insisted that far from leading to nihilism or the insecurity of all sense and value, irony tended to show just how reliable most literary meaning is. It is because what the author says is so obviously false that ‘we’ know something else must have been meant. If a text is manifestly racist, bigoted, confused and narrow then we either assume that this is not a work of literature, in that it lacks all sense and value, or the author is being ironic. As an example Booth turns to one of Robert Browning’s (1812–8 9) dramatic monologues, where Browning typically presents the voice of a speaker who unintentionally reveals more than they mean to say.

‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ (1842) is spoken in the voice of a hypocritical and malicious monk who, in condemning the lewdness and immorality of one of his fellows, shows himself to be all too aware of the ‘flesh’ and its perils. As Booth notes, it is the speaker who notices and describes at length the girl who is supposedly the object of desire; and it is the speaker who assumes the presence of lust, acknowledging that it is so well hidden as to remain unseen. It is the speaker who perceives corruption and then projects it onto his rival who supposedly hides it so well:

…While brown Dolores         
Squats outside the Convent bank         
With Sanchicha, telling stories,         
Steeping tresses in the tank,         
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,         
—    Can’t I see his dead eye glow,         
Bright as ‘twere a Barbary corsair’s?         
(That is, if he’d let it show!)

(Browning [1842] 1988, 200–1      [4.25–3    2])

This humorous contradiction is, Booth argues, clearly ironic. If the poemwere not ironic then it would be a mere rant. It is because we assume areadership and authorship that is insightful, rather than malevolent andhypocritical, that we can also assume that the poem is ironic, and thisirony presents us with no special problems of interpretation:

The task of deciding precisely what emotional load Browning gave to his ironic portraiture, or what response a reader does or should give him, is not necessarily less difficult, once that portrait has been constructed, than in works that make no ironic demands.

(Booth 1974, 148)

The author could not himself be endorsing religious hypocrisy; and no enlightened reader would miss this point:

To me, the very nature of the speaker’s sins undercuts any effort to read the poem with solemnity or even gravity. But to say that ‘solemnity is ironically undercut’ by many details in the poem I must, once again, make certain inferences about the author… I…must either assume in advance or derive from the poem some picture of his artistic skill, including his concern for artistic coherence.

(Booth 1974, 149)

Irony, for Booth, is most often a rhetorical figure or trope within an otherwise stable context of human sense and understanding. Given the choice, we opt for charity: we assume that the author’s meaning is what we would agree with. We assume that the author is human, benevolent and enlightened, ironically distanced from the text, and not the incoherent and self-incriminating voice of the ironised speaker. For Booth, irony assumes, rather than disrupts, a common ground.

For philosophers like Searle and literary critics like Booth and Muecke, all of whom were wary of the tendency for modern ‘theory’ to overemphasise linguistic instability, irony is evidence of the fundamental coherence of language and literature. By contrast, for philosophers more interested in literature and negativity like Sören Kierkegaard (1813–5 5) and Nehamas and twentieth century literary critics with an interest in the postmodern like Candace Lang and Linda Hutcheon, irony tends towards the multiplication of viewpoints and incoherence. This dispute over irony is also a dispute over the status of politics—whether politics begins with agreement and recognition or difference and incommensurability. On the one hand, there are those who see irony as a rhetorical figure that is ultimately recognised because there is something like shared human understanding. Socrates’ irony would, or should, be a rhetorical move in order to reinforce truth and consensus. Literary effect or rhetoric could then be judged from some external point of knowledge, theory or truth. On this model, politics would not just be praxis or effective speech; it would be speech directed to some end or ideal, such as the human or shared good that we must all presuppose. On the other hand there are those who see irony as a way of life, embodied in the figure of Socrates who refused to present virtue and the good life as a fixed ideal that could be known. Irony—the continual questioning or distance from fixed norms—is the possibility of politics as praxis: as engaged activity achieved through dynamic speech and collective participation. Those who emphasise the stability of irony value, or assume the value of, a politics directed towards community and unity. Those who celebrate the destabilising force of irony, by contrast, insist that politics is the rejection, contestation or disruption of shared norms.

According to Candice Lang (1988), who argues that the tradition of irony’s repression is only now being liberated through postmodern humour, the restriction of irony to a ‘merely’ literary effect goes back to Quintilian. Following Cicero, Quintilian introduces a distinction between irony as a trope and irony that is habitual or an extended figure. With this distinction it becomes possible to decide against the wholesale personality of Socratic irony and focus, as most would do, on the rhetorical uses of irony. Socrates’ irony and dismissal of rhetoric suggested a truth available to private philosophical contemplation. Socrates instituted a model of truth above and beyond political discussion. Rhetoric henceforth would be subordinated to a techne or skill which ultimately served some end outside rhetorical ploys.

In Quintilian this tendency, recognised by Cicero, for irony to be subjected to some non-rhetorical truth is extended and intensified. What is significant is that, from Quintilian to the Renaissance, mention of Socratic or extended and habitual irony falls away. Further, the entire political context of rhetoric also shifts. In Cicero’s time rhetoric was not an isolated literary or technical skill. Rhetoric was a political practice, to do with advocating causes, deciding questions of law and public good. The main tradition of rhetoric to which Cicero was already appealing went back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, where rhetoric was also defined as an art subordinate to some ultimate purpose or argument, to logic or dialectic. Aristotle had also defined irony as a trope or rhetorical strategy within argument, and when he referred to Socratic irony he insisted that Socrates’ pretended ignorance or downplaying of his knowledge ought to give way to an honest model of good citizenship. The truly virtuous soul accurately and honestly presents himself as he is, and does not dissimulate. From Aristotle, through Quintilian and onwards, the Socratic or extended irony which makes all speech questionable becomes less important. The rhetorical or Ciceronian model of politics as explicit rhetoric and active persuasion gave way to a theoretical politics concerned with a contemplative intuition of the good. As Cicero warned, the Platonic subordination of rhetoric to truth led to the downplaying of active speech and engagement and an emphasis on truth as private contemplation, with rhetoric as mere ornament. Rhetoric itself shifts from being what it was in Cicero’s day—active politics and public engagement—and becomes an art of skilled speech and presentation.

Today, when writers defend the stability of irony they do so because they assume that politics is primarily directed towards consensus, communication and the minimisation of ambiguity and conflict. They also assume that there are norms or truths outside political performance or rhetoric. The idea that one might aim, as Socrates appears to have done, to disrupt consensus and be other than shared norms would be unacceptable for any politics based on modern notions of transparency and justification. Both the philosopher, John Searle, and the literary critic, Wayne Booth, insist on stable irony as the proper example for an understanding of irony precisely because they understand rhetoric as a device and practice within human understanding; rhetoric can only work because there is some presupposed context. Neither Booth nor Searle consider a sense or truth beyond context to which irony might refer; nor do they see irony as disruptive of contexts. It is the unremarkable, uncontested and trans-historical form of irony, in which the contrary meaning is clearly intended, that gives us the possibility of irony in general. Irony is part of a more general process of understanding and recognition, where we discern intentions and meanings through the assumption of common conventions and projects and an overall ideal of coherence. The ironies within a literary text are signalled either by plot or by disjunctions of character and context. We should not take a modern or postmodern concept of irony, such as the Romantic or post-structuralist suspicion of fixed definitions, and apply that concept to pre-modern or stable contexts.

In the next chapter we will look at the tradition of theorising irony that emphasises instability and negativity, the Socrates who was an enigmatic character rather than a philosopher in pursuit of truth. It was the German Romantics who both retrieved the ambiguous Socrates in order to react against a tradition of enlightenment reason and who also influenced the radical theorisation of irony in the twentieth century.

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