The Compass of Irony

D. C. Muecke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000291285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

First published in 1969, The Compass of Irony is a detailed study of the nature, qualities, classifications, and significance of irony.

Divided into two parts, the book offers first a general account of the formal qualities of irony and a classification of the more familiar kinds. It then explores newer forms of irony, its functions, topics, and cultural significance. A wide variety of examples are drawn from a range of different authors, such as Musil, Diderot, Schlegel, and Thomas Mann. The final chapter considers the detachment and seeming superiority of the ironist and discusses what this means for the morality of irony.

The Compass of Irony will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of irony as both a literary and a cultural phenomenon.

Part One

I
IRONOLOGY

Banks fou, braes fou,
Gether ye a the day,
Ye'll no gether yer nieves fou.

Getting to grips with irony seems to have something in common with gathering the mist; there is plenty to take hold of if only one could. To attempt a taxonomy of a phenomenon so nebulous that it disappears as one approaches is an even more desperate adventure. Yet if, upon examination, irony becomes less nebulous, as it does, it remains elusively Protean. Its forms and functions are so diverse as to seem scarcely amenable to a single definition: Anglo-Saxon understatement, eighteenth-century raillery, Romantic Irony, and schoolboy sarcasm are all forms of irony; Sophocles and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Kafka, Swift and Thomas Mann are all ironists; for Socrates irony was a standpoint, the governing principle of his intellectual activity; to Quintilian irony was a figure in rhetoric; to Karl Solger irony was the very principle of art; and to Cleanth Brooks irony is, 'the most general term we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context'.¹ Irony may be a weapon in a satirical attack, or a smokescreen concealing a retreat, or a device for turning the world or oneself inside out; irony may be found in words and attitudes, in events and situations; or we may find nothing on earth and quite certainly nothing in heaven that is not ironic.

There is enough here to suggest how agreeable it would be if one could get it all properly sorted out, and enough to suggest the improbability of ever succeeding. There seems, however, to be no difficulty in finding explanations for the conceptual fogginess of irony, and it is perhaps with these explanations that one should begin. First of all there are the related points that the several forms of irony may each be approached and therefore defined from many different angles, and that in practice instances of irony are usually complicated by other factors which may then illegitimately enter into definitions of irony. Secondly, there is the feeling that 'irony' should mean 'good irony', that is, the feeling that irony ought to be qualitatively defined, and this means running into the same sorts of difficulties as one meets in attempting to define 'Art' or 'Pure Poetry', And thirdly, there is the fact that the concept of irony is still in the process of being developed so that almost everyone may be dismayed by the narrowness of some definitions and outraged by the looseness of others.

In seeking to define irony or distinguish its several kinds one can quite legitimately look at it from many different angles. But it is precisely this that explains the chaos which the terminology of irony presents. One has only to reflect for a moment upon the various names that have been given to 'kinds' of irony - tragic irony, comic irony, irony of manner, irony of situation, philosophical irony, practical irony, dramatic irony, verbal irony, in genu irony, double irony, rhetorical irony, self-irony, Socratic Irony, Romantic Irony, cosmic irony, sentimental irony, irony of Fate, irony of chance, irony of character, etc. - to see that some have been named from the effect, others from the medium, others again from the technique, or the function, or the object, or the practitioner, or the tone, or the attitude. Clearly, there could be several mutually independent (and separately inadequate) classifications of the 'kinds' of irony, each based upon a different point of view; but merely to go on inventing and using as occasion requires such a scatter of terms as I have listed will ensure that one never sees any ordered relationship between the kinds and consequently never gets a clear picture of the whole range or compass of irony.

Again, since we find in literature not just irony but the irony or Ariosto and Molière, Hardy and Proust, the tasks of distinguishing the kinds and detecting the essential qualities of irony are complicated by the natural desire to describe as accurately as possible the personal quality of each author's irony. But obviously, Byronic irony is not a kind of irony that any other writer may practise at will. The difference between, let us say, Chaucer's irony and Thomas Mann's irony is not entirely a matter of different ironical techniques and strategies nor this difference compounded by the difference between an Englishman's fourteenth-century and a German's twentieth-century outlook; it consists partly of the difference between Chaucer and Thomas Mann. Their ironical manners reflect their personalities - le style ironique est l'homme meme. This implies a distinction, for practical purposes, between an ironologist and a literary critic analogous to the distinction between an academic depth-psychologist and a practising psychoanalyst. It would be the business of the critic but not of the ironologist to give a complete account of the differences between the irony of one writer and that of another. It is the business of the ironologist to prepare the ground for a complete account; he is permitted therefore to simplify and generalize. To the ironologist, Chaucer's irony will not mean all that it might mean to a critic or a reader of Chaucer. This is not to say that the ironologist will find himself able to dispense with the skills of the literary critic.

The concept of irony is also obscured by the frequent and close conjunction of irony with satire and with such phenomena as the comic, the grotesque, the humorous, and the absurd. As a result there is a tendency to define irony in terms of the qualities of these other things, some of which defy definition even more successfully than irony. But irony is not essentially related to satire, and when it is related in practice it is a relationship of means to end; and although irony is frequently found overlapping with the absurd or the comic it may also be found overlapping with the tragic.

As a subject for discussion irony is more than a set of conceptual and methodological problems. To deal with irony even from a theoretical point of view is to be dealing with an art or, if one is thinking of the ironies of life, at least with very striking objets trouvés. One has some sympathy, therefore, with the desire to define irony so as not to ignore what it is that characterizes effective or successful irony even though this should mean weighing the imponderable and objectifying the subjective. What can be said, putting it very simply, is that the art of irony is the art of saying something without really saying it. It is an art that gets its effects from below the surface, and this gives it a quality that resembles the depth and resonance of great art triumphantly saying much more than it seems to be saying. And yet one must also say of irony that it is an art closely related to wit; it is intellectual rather than musical, nearer to the mind than to the senses, reflective and self-conscious rather than lyrical and self-absorbed. Its virtues are those of fine prose rather than those of lyric poetry. No one will need to be reminded how many of the great writers of prose were also great ironists, nor that the Age of Prose and Reason was also the period in which the art of irony (and of the novel) developed so rapidly.

It would be too simple to say that prose tends to be ironical and poetry tends not to be; poetry was often ironical before and during the Age of Prose as well as afterwards, and prose is by no means typically characterized by irony. The distinction is between that kind of writing which, largely by means of syntax, exploits the possibilities of wittily ordering ideas while neglecting or subordinating other possibilities and that other kind of writing which, largely by means of 'music', metaphor, and elevated diction, exploits the possibilities of evoking moods and feelings. Among earlier poets we may compare Chaucer, the sophisticated 'Southren' man rejecting the strong rhythms of the alliterative line and practising the run-on couplet and the throw-away rhyme, with 'our sage and serious' Spenser who reverted to alliteration and devised a remote poetic diction and a highly musical stanza for his Faerie Queene. In later ironical poetry a reflective or a self-conscious quality (both words attest the inherent duality of irony) is manifested in the mock-heroic poems of the Enlightenment, the anti-climactic element in Byron and Heine, and the sly juxtapositions and sous-entendus of Eliot. Here the contrasts would be with Paradise Lost (which is not, however, entirely unironical), with Keats, and with Dylan Thomas.

Prose-writers too may be compared along these lines; Harvey Gross in his Sound and Form in Modern Poetry compares the opening sentences of Pride and Prejudice and Ulysses in terms that are completely apropos though he is not thinking of irony:

[Jane Austen] fashions a prosody of wit. The movement of her language is quick with 'the feel of thought' - the powers of abstraction, of generalization, of perceiving and confronting ideas. Joyce's language moves on different principles. His prose is dense with heavy stresses, alliterative effects, and a careful placing of long and short vowels. He is not concerned with the witty presentation of an idea but with things and arrangements; and, as we learn from the context, symbols. The rhythm of Joyce's prose is determined by the weight and shape of the words; Jane Austen's rhythm is determined by the shape of her syntax formed by the energy of her mind.²

But these are only hints towards a poetics of irony, a large subject and one that is outside the scope of the present work.

Even without bringing into consideration the fact that the concept of irony is still evolving, we can see that the diversity of the forms of irony multiplied by the diversity of approaches to irony - the attempts to define it in terms of motivation, function, aesthetic quality, or response - and the difficulty of distinguishing it from the satiric, the comic, and so on might themselves explain why there has not been any adequate classification of irony. They might also explain why there is no history of irony in European literature, or even the outline of a history. So far as I know, there is no complete history of irony in any of the principal European literatures. J. A. K. Thomson's Irony: An Historical Introduction (1927) is restricted to classical literature. An article by Earle Birney briefly and with disabling omissions covers English irony before Chaucer. F. McD. C. Turner's book The Element of Irony in English Literature (1926) omits Chaucer and Shakespeare and is eccentric in other ways. Beda Allemann's Ironie und Dichtung (1956) covers Germanic literature from Schlegel to Musil. Morton L. Gurewitch has written a doctoral thesis on 'European Romantic Irony'.

The history of the concept of irony is in rather better shape. Otto Ribbeck's 'Über den Begriff des εἳρων' (1876) is the classical study of eironeia in Greek literature of the fifth and fourth centuries. G. G. Sedgewick's Harvard dissertation of 1913 traced the history of the word through classical Greek and Latin to Medieval Latin. Norman Knox, in his The Word IRONY and its Context 1500-1755 (1961), has carried the history of the semantic development of the English word from its first appearance down to the date of Dr Johnson's dictionary. And I think one could safely assume that in 1755 the concept of irony in other European countries had not become significantly more complex than it had in England.

It was, however, after 1755 that the word 'irony' began to take on several quite new meanings, though less rapidly in England and France than in Germany. In 1755 Dr Johnson apparently recognized only one kind of irony, defined in his dictionary as: 'A mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words.' Though he was somewhat behind the more knowledgeable of his contemporaries (vide Knox) in a theoretical acquaintance with irony - a precedent seized upon by subsequent lexicographers and encyclopaedists - not even the most knowledgeable had more than a glimmering recognition of dramatic irony as a form of irony. The force of dramatic irony had of course long been felt, and by story-tellers as well as dramatists. I raise later the question of how explicitly it was felt and by what other names it was referred to. The concept of dramatic irony was introduced into English by Connop Thirlwall in 1833, but, as Sedgewick notes, the term was not universally acceptable even as late as 1907. Bradley in his Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) uses the term 'Sophoclean irony' but felt the need to define it and distinguish it from 'irony in the ordinary sense'. So far as I can discover the position was no better in France or Germany (see page 40).

A. W. Schlegel's unwillingness to admit the presence of irony in tragedy was owing in part to his not having a clear idea of dramatic irony and in part to his inability to separate irony and satire (which connotes the comic).

No doubt, wherever the proper tragic enters everything like irony immediately ceases; but from the avowed raillery of Comedy, to the point where the subjection of mortal beings to an inevitable destiny demands the highest degree of seriousness, there are a multitude of human relations which unquestionably may be considered in an ironical view, without confounding the eternal line of separation between good and evil.³

His brother Friedrich's concept of irony, as we shall see later on, was much more advanced and unorthodox than this.

It was, however, the German Romantics who first recognized Shakespeare's objectivity as a kind of irony, objectivity in the sense of a free critical detachment from, and fully conscious power over, one's own creations. And it was they who invented Romantic Irony with the startling claim that irony is the very principle of art. The history of the concept of Romantic Irony from Friedrich Schlegel to Kierkegaard has been written by Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische Ironie in Theorie und Gestaltung (1960).

With minor exceptions (Thirlwall, I. A. Richards, and the 'N...