Thoughts About Irony

“Irony” comes from the Greek word “eiron,” meaning a man who makes himself appear less than he is. When Odysseus returned at last from Troy, he appeared to be a ragged beggar, not the rightful King of Ithaca. No one paid attention to him until he revealed himself by stringing his own bow—which none of his wife Penelope’s suitors, or anyone else, had the strength to do. 

So irony is about saying one thing and meaning another. We’re all familiar with one kind of irony: sarcasm. Your mother used to ask if you’d cleaned up your room and you answered: “Of course, mother dear.” The words were perfectly polite, but your tone of voice drove your mother crazy just as you intended.

Both sarcasm and other kinds of irony rely for their effect on the perceived gap between the surface meaning of a statement and the less obvious meaning. For example, in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Huck has written a note to the owner of Jim, a runaway black slave, saying where Jim is. Then, before sending it, Huck thinks of Jim as a friend, tears up the note, and says: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell!”

From the point of view of a slaveholding society, Huck has indeed committed a sin: he’s depriving a property-owner of legal property. He sees himself as a bad person by “sivilized” standards. As a social outcast, Huck is considered a juvenile delinquent by most right-thinking people. But we see his decision as truly moral, even if he doesn’t see it himself.

A little later, while making up a story to explain himself, he says his riverboat blew up. “Good gracious!” says the woman he’s deceiving. “Anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” 

If we read this without understanding Twain’s irony, we're going to be offended. But Twain is really condemning the woman’s bigoted values, not endorsing them.

Irony assumes we will understand what it’s really trying to say, but sometimes readers miss it completely. (That’s one reason why Huckleberry Finn is always coming under fire from adults who think it’s racist, when it’s one of the great anti-racist books of all time.) So irony can be dangerous to fool around with.

Irony can also undercut what may be a perfectly serious theme. Some kinds of story are just no longer tellable, thanks to the attacks of ironists. Cervantes made it impossible to tell another chivalric romance with a straight face; even if you tried it, people would assume that you were either trying to do a deadpan Quixote, or that you were deeply stunned.

Similarly, no one would now dream of writing a novel about gallant Tommies finding glory in the trenches of World War I; Hemingway and a host of others closed off that idea for good.

Those of us who write genre fiction are usually beneath the notice of really good ironists; the best we can hope for is an affectionate punch up the conk from Terry Pratchett or one of the various lampooners of Chandler-style private eyes (Dan Simmons’s SF novel Hyperion has a cross-genre example). But the sheer volume of titles in the current popular genres guarantees a certain academicism among many authors and readers. Just as we can recognize “hommages” paid in one film to the director of another, we recognize one writer's response to another writer’s character, setting, or plot.

But when we do, we also feel a certain detachment. The story no longer enfolds us; we’re not part of the action any more, but bystanders amusedly comparing this particular treatment to the last one. To the extent that literature may sometimes help us grow up, this detachment is probably helpful: it makes us wonder why we get such a charge out of blazing six-guns or alien invaders or torn bodices.

Push the detachment hard enough, however, and you find yourself teetering on the brink of deconstructionism and the nihilist view that we have no stories, only texts—all of which contain so many possible interpretations that they are all meaningless. (Except, of course, for deconstructionist criticism of other texts.)

Northrop Frye argues somewhere (I think in The Secular Scripture, about the role of romance in literature) that irony is a sign of a worn-out form; its appearance usually precedes a return to popular forms of entertainment which have kept their primitive vigor. That certainly seems to be the case in modern English-language literature, but the popular forms have themselves suffered so much attention that even they suffer from excess of irony: recent movie treatments of Batman and Dick Tracy come to mind.

The moral of this sermon, I suppose, is that fiction writers have to be aware of the tendency of their stories to mock themselves; but they also have to be aware of their stories’ innate worth. In that, our stories are just like our lives.

 

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