digloria[kelley]@mindspring.com wrote:
> >yeah but catherine y'all get the kewler status of having dossiers kept on
> you about your activities trying to smuggle irony across the borders when
> you visit the states.
I must confess that despite many years study of Irony I have never quite been
able to understand it, at least to my own satisfaction, and I was never able
to define it so my students could fully understand it. Perhaps some of the
participants in this discussion (which began I believe with Marx on
justice)can fill in the gaps in my understanding and correct my errors.
Some forms seem pretty simple at first. The seemingly simplest and
most common, for example, might be compared to a dog exposing
its throat to another dog to indicate friendly intent. Wayne Booth
starts out with this in his careful book on the rhetoric of irony. I don't
have that book at hand now but if I remember correctly the example
he gives is somewhat as follows. It is raining hard outside, and a
student comes into his office dripping wet. He says to the student:
"I'm glad the weather has finally turned sunny."
Now this seems to fit the dictionary definition, sense 1 (AHD: "The use
of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning"), but if so it
seems hardly worthy of all the praise successive generations of critics
have piled on it. But Booth suggests a more complex construal, which
lets us see part of the power. (It doesn't, however, explain why Kelley
should think it would have to be smuggled in.)
Booth's paraphrase (as I remember it) is something like this. "I know
you know that it is really raining outside, so by saying it's sunny I am
showing
that I trust you not to think I'm stupid; I also know that you will know that
I
don't really think you are so stupid as to think that it's sunny outside just
because a professor says so, so you will know both that I trust your
intelligence and that I trust your good will, because you will neither think
I'm stupid nor calling you stupid. So we can both relax and trust each
other." That of course only begins to unravel the complexities of the
example, and perhaps someone more skilled at glossing irony than I
am can provide a better paraphrase -- and also explain to me why
the U.S. should forbid the importation of such phrases, thus requiring
that they be smuggled in. And of course Wayne Booth is an American,
so perhaps someone can tell me who smuggled the information to him.
And finally, he is (was) a professor at one of the higher institutions of
learning, so I'm a little surprised (judging from comments on this list)
that he should have any idea at all of what irony is, and certainly not
be able to provide examples of it.
Now I think there are examples of this friendly ground-breaking kind
of irony in the *Iliad*, and if so they would be our oldest examples
of irony in the west, but I don't have time just now to look those up
so I will take up the oldest I remember right away, those in *Oedipus
Tyrannus*. The Chorus of citizens begs Oedipus to search for the
murderer of Laius, and his speech answering them contains the
following words:
Since I am now the holder of his [Laius's] office,
and have his bed and wife that once was his,
and had his line not been unfortunate
we would have common children -- (fortune leaped
upon his head) -- because of all these things,
I fight in his defence as for my father. . . .
If I have been misconstruing this in the many years I have
taught it to ISU undergraduates it will be painful to learn that, but
as Sophocles' contemporary Socrates always argued (or at least so
Plato claims), it is better to know the truth no matter how painful.
So if my construal is terribly wrong I hope some subscriber to this
list will teach me the truth.
Basically this seems to be the same as the example Booth gives;
that is, it is a way of establishing trust between writer and reader
(listener), and like that example involves two different levels of
knowledge, but whereas in the Booth example the speaker pretends
to know less than the listener, in the Sophoclean example, the pretended
speaker (Oedipus) really does know less than the listener (the
audience), so the words are not ironic for the speaker but they are
for the listener. But actually this is misleading, for the "real speaker" is
not Oedipus, who is only a mouthpiece, but Sophocles, and Sophocles,
like the professor in Booth's example, is complimenting his audience on
having a higher level of understanding than the nominal or fictional
speaker. And with this comparison in mind, I would think of the Booth
speaker as actually being two speakers, one (the dumb one) a fictional
or nominal speaker, the other (the "real" one) being an intelligent
speaker intent on massaging the ego of the listener.
But this leads to trouble. Surely the U.S. censors would not object
to a rhetorical technique aimed at massaging the ego of the reader. That
seems to be the central aim of most WSJ editorials, for example, and
no censor or customs official would dream of excluding WSJ editorials
from the United States. Perhaps I simply don't understand Kelley's
argument here. And if not, I'm sure she will clear up my confusion for
me.
I have more problems of understanding remaining, understandings
or misunderstandings which may also have affected my teaching over
the last 40 years. I always told my students that irony has to be sharply
distinguished from sarcasm. If Booth's example is seen as sarcasm
rather than irony, one would have to see the professor as mocking the
student, rather than complimenting him as is the case if we interpret it
as irony.) The AHD gives, as the first sense of "sarcasm," "A sharply
mocking or contemptuous remark, typically utilizing statements or
implications pointedly opposite or irrelevant to the underlying purport."
This leads to a problem with Doug's analysis of a passage from *Capital*,
a passage which I had always taken as, first, sarcasm, and *then*, irony,
with the result that it ends up with a repudiation of the concept of justice.
Doug first speaks of there being "no small bit of irony here" [i.e., in
Marx's
general argument as to the justice of exploitation under capitalism], and
then quotes the passage beginning "The sphere of circulation . . .is in fact
a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of
Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. . . ."
I have two difficulties. The first is minor. I had always thought of irony
as being like pregnancy: it either was or wasn't, and one cannot speak
of varying quantities of it. But perhaps Doug could explain that. The
second understanding or misunderstanding I bring to the passage quoted
involves the distinction between sarcasm and irony. The passage seems
distinctly sarcastic to me, clearly being an instance of what the AHD calls
statements "pointedly opposite" to the underlying purport. In particular,
there seems to be no miming of the naivete or ignorance (in contrast to
the reader's knowledge) always characteristic of irony. I have always
assumed that an important distinction of sarcasm, as distinct from irony
is that sarcasm offers no difficulty of paraphrase, and that a paraphrase
of it is usually adequate to the underlying "literal meaning," while
in the case of irony paraphrase is always (as is clear from the Booth
example) wholly inadequate to express the trope's content. (In fact, it
seems to me that for many purposes, irony is the only trope that is
*not* paraphraseable, while sarcasm, if a trope at all, is the most
paraphraseable of all tropes.)
In reference to the passage in question, then, one might as well say
(assuming
it to be sarcastic) that the literal meaning is that the sphere of
circulation
is the hell denying all human rights, the realm of unfreedom,
inequality, and deprivation of property. And it therefore asserts, quite
literally, that Bentham denies all these values. (The last is not
satisfactory:
perhaps in the reference to Bentham we have an irony inside a sarcasm
inside an irony.) But if the passage is ultimately ironic, and I think I
agree with
Doug, then it is an ironic denial of the justice, equality, and freedom of
life under capitalism, and must, therefore, be in some subtle sense (ironic
not sarcastic) an affirmation of the justice of capitalism -- but since that
is impossible, it must be an ironic denial of the meaningfulness of the
concept of justice. (Remembering that an ironic denial is never a simple
denial, and that the paraphrase is never adequate to the original trope.)
But Doug proceeds beyond the mere construal of this passage,
asserting the following:
<<Though Marx's style was often ironic, his heirs have often been
rather irony-challenged, it seems to me. I guess that's what happens
when critique gets transformed into dogma. Which reminds me, I
must re-read Lefebvre on irony, soon.>>
[I am interested in all/most critiques of irony myself, and will have
to get ahold of Lefebvre.]
I have some problems of understanding here too, some of which
may be gotten at by more attention to the complexities of irony,
this time with what is probably the single most famous ironic
statement in English, the opening sentence of *Pride and Prejudice*.
(Its fame and wide use as an example is partly due to the fact that
it is the opening sentence, and thus in appearance at least requires
no discussion of context, since an opening sentence rather provides
its own context. We shall see.) The sentence (which also makes up
the novel's first paragraph): "It is a truth universally acknowledged,
that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of
a wife."
The first point about the sentence (and the primary point needed
to understand not only the whole of *Pride and Prejudice* but the
collected fiction of Jane Austen) is that the sentence is not about
single men, wives, etc. but about the reader -- *any* reader. No
writer in English is more careful -- and few are as careful -- of the
accuracy of his/her diction as Austen, so "universally acknowledged"
must be a statement about anyone who ever picks up the novel. Hence
it states that the reader recognizes the truth (and "truth" and "absolute
truth" would be synonymous for Austen) of the need (want) of all
rich men for a wife. And of course practically all readers would at
once be prepared to deny the universal acceptance (one rejection will
do the trick) of the proposition. And so, as with Booth's statement,
the reader must immediately make a judgment: Is Austen a fool or
does she believe me to be a fool -- or is there some third alternative.
Practically all readers assume an alternative. As we shall see, *practically*
all but NOT all readers, and this (we will see later) leads us close to the
heart of one of the features of irony not yet mentioned in this paper.
Moreover, even of those who assume a third alternative, a large
number (perhaps a majority) are mistaken as to the exact natuare of the
alternative. Or, rather, perhaps as the reader of Marx (if my assumption
of a sarcasm inside an irony is correct), most see the sarcasm but not the
irony in the sentence. Seeing the latter requires not only a careful reading
of the sentence but a *re-reading* of it after having finished the entire
novel. Like *Finnegan's Wake*, its final sentences begin its first sentence.
The sarcasm (and the irony?) is developed (and slightly enrichened) on
the same page, where we see it applies, within the fiction of the novel,
to Mrs. Bennet, who is quite unable to recognize either an irony or
a sarcasm. She wishes her husband to call on a new (single and rich)
neighbor:
"What is his name?"
"Bingley."
"Is he married or single?"
"Oh! single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune;
four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!"
"How so? how can it affect them?"
"My dear Mr. Bennet," replied his wife, "how can you be so
tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one
of them."
"Is that his design in settling here?
And so forth. Obviously Mrs. Bennet *acts* as though she believes
that every single man of fortune needs one of her daughters as a
wife. It is the only principle which will give coherence to her actions.
And Mr. Bennet is a powerful wielder of irony -- or at least sarcasm.
Mrs Bennet is a fool, as all victims of irony are (or seem to be), and
Mr. Bennet's pleasure in his marriage comes from exhibiting her
foolishness, over and over again. But as the narrator (speaking for
Elizabeth) notes later in the novel:
=====
To his wife he [Mr. Bennet] was very little otherwise indebted, than
as her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is
not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe
to his wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the
true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.
Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of
her father's behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with
pain; but respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate
treatment of herself, she had endeavoured to forget what she
could not overlook, and to banish from her thoughts that continual
breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his
wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly reprehensible.
But she had never felt so strongly as now, the disadvantages which
must attend the children of so unsuitable a marriage, nor ever been
so fully aware of the evils arising from so ill-judged a direction of
talents; talents which rightly used, might at least have preserved the
respectability of his daughters, even if incapable of enlarging the mind
of his wife.
=========
The second paragraph above lacks the delight of "but where other powers
of...," but nevertheless is worth the consideration of anyone placing great
stress (outside the bounds of imaginative literature) on the powers of irony.
(For those unacquainted with Austen's fiction, *Pride and Prejudice* is
no more than an introduction to the three masterpieces which follow it. In
comparison with Mrs. Norris in *Mansfield Park* Shakespeare's Iago is
a mere boy scout.)
While the sarcasm of the opening paragraphs, then, is at Mrs. Bennet's
expense, the irony of the page, perhaps of the whole novel, is at *MR.*
Bennet's expense.
The richness of the opening sentence (and the uses of irony in general
and not just in Austen) becomes fully visible only when the reader
comes to realize that it is *also* literally true: Darcy *does* need a
wife in order to be Darcy. (A development of this point would require
a rewriting, focusing on Austen, of my article on Milton.) That is, irony
only achieves its full richness if it overlaps allegory (conceived as a
story that is both literally true *and* carries an independent meaning
which can be played off against its direct story. Another famous example
would be the second paragraph of Chapter 1 of Book 2 of the *Travels
of Lemuel Gulliver*, copied from a book of travel so jargon heavy as to
parody itself -- but the whole of *Gulliver* loses its richness unless one
sees that Gulliver is both a fool and a person of considerable technical
expertise and shrewdness. Hence that paragraph is *both* an ironic
parody of bad technical writing *and* also an exhibition of Gulliver's
real learning. Anyone who fails to see these conflicting aspects
of irony can be said to be irony-challenged.
But that is almost everyone who is not either, like Austen, Swift, and Marx,
what bourgeois critics call "a genius *or* has not, as I have, made the study
of irony (both ironic works and scholarship devoted to irony) a central
concern of decades of one's life. For example, almost *all* of my students
over many years of teaching *Pride and Prejudice* failed to understand
the following passage:
Elizabeth had the satisfaction of seeing her father taking pains
to get acquainted wih him [Darcy]; and Mr. Bennet soon
assured her that he was rising every hour in his esteem.
"I admire all my three sons-in-law highly," said he. "Wickham,
perhaps, is my favourite; but I think I shall like *your* husband
quite as well as Jane's."
Wickham is the nominal villain of the book, and this statement by
Mr. Bennet endlessly confused students, even after the preceding
378 pages in which his love of irony/sarcasm had been endlessly
emphasized -- both by the author and by the instructor in class. This
of course immensely heightened the self-esteem of those few
students who *did* understand the sentence. Nothing is more
soothing to the ego than the contemplation of those who are more
irony-challenged than oneself.
And this is why irony (except for the kind of strictly friendly irony
illustrated by Booth) is a deadly sin in political discourse, except
among admitted political elites. I use "elite" positiviely here -- for
example it applies to all those who claim to understand *Capital*
or to have read the *Grundrisse*. Members of that elite clearly
must talk to each other -- but they must also clearly prepare to
speak to others who are not and never will be readers of the
*Grundrisse*. And irony is usually fatal to the latter task, for
the reason given in the Thesis III. Irony (as well as mechanical
materialism) "necessarily arrives at dividing society into two
parts, of which one is superior to society." This is what Mr.
Bennet's remark on Wickham did in my fiction classes. It is what
irony (of any complexity) always does. This is clearly the
conscious goal of all the great ironists -- e.g., Stendahl, Austen,
Swift, Flaubert -- as well as of lesser ones such as Thurber or
Rochester or Carew. Swift *knows* what true Christianity
is, and *knows* that a (very small) audience exists which
shares that knowledge with him, and which is ready and willing
to join in contempt for all that do not share that knowledge. This
is the only possible basis for such an incedibly complex piece
of irony as "Argument against the abolishing of Christianity."
But Doug combines a one-phrase zinger attacking dogmatism with
his paragraph on irony. Now I think dogmatism is a bit more complex
than Doug seems to think it is, and while I can't discuss it in detail
here I can offer, in the context of this discussion of irony, a few
provisional observations which might point the way to further
exploration.
First let's get down some of the obvious points. "Dogmatism," like
"sectarianism," is an allusion to religion and religious dogma. Now
the point (in Christianity anyhow) of dogma is in the proposition
(quoted from memory) that "Whoso believeth in me shall attain
eternal life." That is, for actual religious dogma, belief in and of
itself is a positive good, in fact for Calvinist and Lutheran theologies,
the greater good. (Hence the great debate, in which thousands or
hundreds of thousands died, over faith vs. works.)
Now, on the margins of Marxist discourse, one encounters a
sprinkling of alleged marxists who seem to believe something
like this, though I have never in 30 years of activity encountered
more than a few in practice. A certain Klo M on the "old" L-I
list insisted that everyone should believe that Stalin was a
"genius in the art of government," and never did have an answer
to my proposition that geniuses in the art of government were a
dime a dozen. In other words, he seemed to think that merely
believing in the purity of Stalin in itself directlty contributed to
the coming of the revolution.
But what seemed to characterize even the collection of "dogmatists"
(scare quotes because so far undefined and thus not demonstrative
of anything) was the belief that fundamental marxist principles could
translate directly to practice. But it seems to me that a very common
kind of critique of Marxism departs from exactly the same dogmatism.
Critics discover that *Capital* (with its focus on class) does not
tell us what to do when we get up tomorrow morning. It does not,
for example, tell us what to think about race or abortion or the
means of achieving unity or even what "unity" means. They then
immediately decide that the theory is defective and that we must
start all over again to build a new theory from the ground up. The
first kind of dogmatism would try to cook dinner from the instructions
contained in the three laws of thermodynamics; the second kind of
dogmatism (which, frankly, I think dominates this list) would decide
that the laws of thermodynamics were defective because they did
not tell us how to cook dinner.
In any case, I think Doug owes us a developed discussion of
the relationship, if any, of lack of irony and dogmatism rather
than a merely dogmatic assertion that one leads to the other.
Now a couple final observations on irony. We need, I think, to
distinguish between the ability or willingness to respond to irony
and the ability to write it. There are some human activities in
which professional competence is desirable -- such as brain
surgery or navigation. I rather think that the production of irony
belongs to this category -- and while I do claim some professional
ability in the construal and analysis of irony, I claim no such
capacity in the production of irony.
This last point should be richly demonstrated by the first two or
three pages of this post, with their lame attempt at irony, but
I think poorly done irony, poorly done because (like most of
the alleged irony on this list) is in fact more like mere sarcasm.
Irony is just too hard a style to produce for most of us, and I
think it decorous for those unable to produce it to be content
with the admiration and appreciation of the irony produced by
others. I apologize for my rather clumsy attempts at the genre,
only insisting that the pretense of ignorance in that attempt is
essential to any irony, competent or incompetent.
[There's a lot more to be said on these topics, but I'll break off
here for now.]
Carrol
