Table of contents Introduction 3 Mission 4 Method 4 Theory 5

Theory

What is irony?

However, according to Paul de Man irony is extremely difficult to define. De Man writes in Aesthetic Ideology that Søren Kierkegaard’s book The Concept of Irony (1841) is an ironic title because irony is not a concept, and as such it would be impossible to give a definition of irony. At his point of departure, De Man refers to German Romanticism in the early part of the nineteenth century, as the important period on the theorization of irony. Furthermore, De Man examines irony from a deconstructive point of view which can be seen by the following. By looking at the different theorists and philosophers of that period, De Man states that even they seem to disagree on the concept of irony. The German aesthetician Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, who writes perceptively about irony in Erwin, Vier Gespräche über das Schöne und die Kunst (1815), complains that the poet August Wilhelm Schlegel, although he writes about irony, he cannot define it. Later on, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who also writes about irony in Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), complains that Solger does not seem to know what he is writing about. Finally, when Søren Kierkegaard writes about the “concept of irony”, he complains that Hegel does not seem to know what irony is. The problem, De Man faces, is that he sees irony to encompass all tropes, but at the same time very difficult to define as a trope. If one was to look at the meaning of the word ‘trope’ which means “to turn”, it would be possible to define irony as a trope according to literary theorist Northrop Frye who defines irony as “a pattern of words that turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning”². As such one can only agree with this definition, but while ‘meaning one thing and saying something else’ or ‘praise by blame’ might be considered traditional definitions of irony, De Man still feels that this turning away in irony involves a more radical negation than one would have in an ordinary trope, such as metaphor or metonymy.

The argument above is also supported by English professor Linda Hutcheon, who in Irony’s Edge (1994) on the communicative concept of irony, states that irony will mean different things to ‘players’. She notes that irony should be seen from the point of view of the interpreter, and therefore becomes an interpretive and intentional move,

it is the making or inferring of meaning in addition to and different what is stated, together with an attitude toward both the said and the unsaid. The move is usually triggered (and then directed) by conflictual textual or contextual evidence or by markers which are socially agreed upon.³

As such irony involves more than simple contradiction and a general consensus among the many theorists of irony only seems to be the notion of irony involving something unsaid. An example of this is stated by Hutcheon who sees how difficult all the parts of a more complex ironic utterance can by logically contradictory. In this aspect Hutcheon argues how a seemingly straightforward utterance such as “I love people who signal” made by a driver in city traffic who has just been cut off by a driver who did not signal. In context, this is irony but the statement is also literally true and furthermore so is its opposite, “I hate people who do not signal” however, such a decoding would involve inverting both parts of a relatively simple sentence. With this Hutcheon argues that no theory of irony as simple logical contradiction on the level of the word would be able to explain how you would know the difference and choose between “I love people who signal” or “I hate people who signal”, on the one hand, and “I hate people who do not signal”, on the other.⁴

Returning to De Man who goes on to say that irony also has a performative function because it consoles, it promises and excuses, which seems to fall out of the tropological field but at the same time is very closely connected with it. So again, it becomes very difficult if not impossible to get to a conceptualization by means of definition. Consequently, De Man’s take on irony becomes deconstructive and this is substantiated through his notion of describing irony as a “permanent parabasis”⁵, a fundamentally uncontrollable figure which destabilizes literature’s internal structures of signification and reduces the meaning of widely different literary works to the same skeptical relativization of the chances of communication. In this perspective, a text is either ironical or earnest, and a division into a playful postmodernism and a serious realism is a natural consequence hereof. It is perhaps better to look at irony from a different approach, which is also mentioned by De Man who briefly takes on the issue by studying Wayne Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony.⁶ The approach made by Booth is possibly more sensible than De Man’s because he starts out from a question in practical criticism and does not get involved in definitions or tropes. He gives the question,

Is it ironic? How do I know that the text with which I am confronted is going to be ironic or is it not going to be ironic? It’s very important to know that: lots of discussions turn around this and one always feels terrible when one has read a text and one it told later on that it’s ironic. It is a very genuine question-whatever you have to do, it would indeed be very helpful and very desirable to know: by what markers, by what devices, by what indications or signals in the text we can decide that a text is ironic or is not?⁷

However, when using Booth’s notion on irony one must assume we know what irony is in order to pose the aforementioned question. And for now let us believe that we have a general idea of what that is even though the concept of irony still seems impossible to define. To put it simply and perhaps foolhardily; irony is saying one thing and meaning another, and as such this aspect becomes what Wayne Booth calls stable irony⁸ because this type requires a complex verbal reconstruction. According to Booth there are four steps of reconstructing stable irony which I now will briefly go through. Step one: The reader is required to reject the literary meaning; however it is not enough that the reader rejects the meaning because he or she disagrees nor is it enough that the reader should add meaning. As such the reader should be able to recognize some incongruity among the words or between the words and something he or she knows. The second step concentrates on alternative interpretations or explanations which are tried out by the reader. In this situation we go through possible alternative explanations and accept these but only when other plausible ones fail to emerge or satisfy us. When this is done we come to step three, where we must make a decision about the author’s knowledge or beliefs. It is at this point that we can begin to determine whether or not the statement is ironic because I must determine that what I reject is also rejected by the author and whether he or she has reason to expect my concurrence. Finally, in step four we can choose a new meaning with which we can rest secure based on the previous three steps. We have now established the process of reconstructing an ironic statement, the main issue now is what I mentioned earlier namely how do we know when an author or speaker is being ironic?