Table Of ContentWAYNE C. BOOTH
A RHETORIC OF IRONY
P641
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A RHETORIC OF IRONY
Wayne C. Booth
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
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IV
FOR LUCILLE
Contents
PREFACE IX
PART I. STABLE IRONY
1 THE WAYS OF STABLE IRONY J
The Marks of Stable Irony 3
Stable Irony Compared with "All Literature" 8
The Four Steps of Reconstruction JO
Ironic Reading as Knowledge 14
Meaning and Significance 19
Stable Irony and Other Figures of Speech 21
Metaphor 22
Allegory and Fable 24
Puns 26
Stable Irony and Satire 27
2 RECONSTRUCTIONS AND JUDGMENTS 33
Rival Metaphors 33
Advantages of "Reconstruction" 37
Required Judgments 39
Some Pleasures and Pitfalls of Irony 43
3 Is IT IRONIC? 47
Clues to Irony 49
1. Straightforward Warnings in the Author's Own Voice 53
2. Known Error Proclain1ed 57
3. Conflicts of Facts within the Work 61
4. Clashes of Style 67
5. Conflicts of Belief 73
Toward Genre: Clues in Context 76
PART II. LEARNING WHERE TO STOP
4 ESSAYS, SA TIRE, PARO DY 9 J
Contexts and the Grooves of Genre 94
Complexity Illustrated JO 1
"A Modest Proposal" and the Ironic Sublime 105
Intentions Once Again 120
Intentions in Parody 12 3
5 IRONIC PORTRAITS ] 37
Dramatic Monologue 141
..
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Contents
Fiction an• Drama 150
"Ready-Made" Values 152
Custom-Built Worlds 169
6 THE lRONIST's VOICE 175
Other Timbres: Metaphor Once Again 176
Fielding 179
E. M. Forster as Essayist 185
7 Is Sr 193
THERE A ANDARD OF TASTE IN IRONY?
Four Levels of Evaluation 196
A. Judging Parts According to Function 197
B. Qualities as Critical Constants 201
C. Success of Particular Works 207
D. Co1nparison of Kinds 2 I 3
The Rhetorical Meeting as Source of Norms 221
Five Crippling Handicaps 222
Ignorance 222
Inability to Pay Attention 223
Prejudice 224
Lack of Practice 226
Emotional Inadequacy 227
Conclusion: Neither Rules nor Relativism 227
III.
PART INSTABILITIES
8
RECONSTRUCTING THE UNRECONSTRUCTABLE:
LOCAL INSTABILITIES 233
The Classification of Intended Ironies 233
Stable-Covert-Local 235
Stable-Overt 236
Unstable Irony 240
Unstable-Overt-Local 246
Unstable-Covert-Local 249
9 INFINITE INSTABILITIES 253
Unstable-Overt-Infinite 253
Unstable-Covert-Infinite 257
Stable-Covert-Infinite 267
A Final Note on Evaluation
277
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX 285
Vlll
Preface
T
his is mainly a book about how we manage to share ironies and
why we often do not; it is only secondarily a book of critical
theory. I hope that it does, however, move toward some elementary
theoretical clarity about a subject which has been--especially since the
Romantic period-the mother of confusions. There is no agreement
among critics about what irony is, and many would hold to the ro
mantic claim, faintly echoed in my final sentences, that its very spirit
and value are violated by the effort to be clear about it. For both its
devotees and for those who fear it, irony is usually seen as something
that undermines clarities, opens up vistas of chaos, and either liberates
by destroying all dogma or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker
of negation at the heart of every affirmation. It is thus a subject that
quickly arouses passions. No other term used by critics, except pos
sibly "rhetoric" itself, has produced so many tracts about the nature
of man or the universe or all literature or all good literature.
Of the many possible views one could take of such a protean
subject, I have seen most value in the rhetorical. The way irony works
in uniting ( or dividing) authors and readers has been relatively ne
glected since the latter part of the eighteenth century, and it has never
been fully explored. Before the eighteenth century, irony was one
rhetorical device among many, the least important of the rhetorical
tropes. By the end of the Romantic period, it had become a grand
Hegelian concept, with its own essence and necessities; or a synonym
for romanticism; or even an essential attribute of God. And in our
century it became a distinguishing mark of all literature, or at least all
good literature, in some of what was said by New Critics like Cleanth
Brooks. Perhaps the most original and important critic of our time,
Kenneth Burke, has made irony into a kind of synonym for comedy,
for the "dramatistic," and for dialectic: all of these refer, in life and
literature, to the ways in which, for those who can tell a hawk from a
handsaw, the hawk's view modifies or "discounts" the handsaw's, and
vice versa.
Once a term has been used to cover just about everything there is,
it perhaps ought simply to be retired; if it can apply to everything, it
can hardly be rescued for everyday purposes. But then, what are
they? For Northrop Frye's effort to comprehend the whole of literature
in one grand vision, irony can mean many different things on many
different pages; indeed it must. Nor does it matter very much that
.
IX
Preface
what he says about irony cannot be reconciled with many works every
one would call ironic. He can even write about it like this, in
A nato,ny of Criticism, perhaps with no great harm:
The ironic fiction-writer, then, deprecates himself and, like
Socrates, pretends to know nothing, even that he is ironic. Com
plete objectivity and suppression of all explicit moral judgements
are essential to his method. Thus pity and fear are not raised in
ironic art: they are reflected to the reader from the art. When we
try to isolate the ironic as such, we find that it seems to be simply
the attitude of the poet as such, a dispassionate construction of a
literary form, with all assertive elements, implied or expressed,
eliminated. Irony, as a mode, is born from the low mimetic; it
takes life exactly as it finds it. But the ironist fables without
moralizing, and has no object but his subject. Irony is naturally a
sophisticated mode. . . . [pp. 40-41]
Well, yes, there is that kind of irony. But what of all those clear-headed
and intense ironic moralists-Voltaire, Swift, Butler, Orwell? Mr.
Frye says they are really satirists. I must agree, in a sense, and I can
even understand why Mr. Frye, whose vision is on an Ideal Order,
must rule that true Irony is one thing and true Satire another. But I
want to know how the particular ironies work in the satire, or in the
tragedy or the comedy or-if there is such a thing-the Ironic Work
itself. And to find out, I must come at things from a different angle
entirely.
My purposes of course go considerably beyond the desire to rescue a
fine old word from total confusion. I have heard it said that the two
standard tutorial questions at Oxford are "What does he mean?" and
"How does he know?" I doubt the report-no university could be that
good-but I take the questions as the best summary of how what I
attempt here contrasts with much that is said about irony. To pick at
Mr. Frye once more-he is large enough to survive my attempt to
subtract one small virtue-I find myself again and again unable to
guess "how he knows" a particular assertion. "The lyric is the genre in
which the poet, like the ironic writer, turns his back on his audience"
(p. 271). Perhaps it is. It is hard to know what Mr. Frye means by this
claim, since one can think of many lyrics and many ironic works in
which the writer comes right down off the stage and buttonholes the
reader, demanding intimacy. But assuming that I have misunderstood,
taking the phrase out of its context, how does Mr. Frye know this?
As tragedy moves over towards irony, the sense of inevitable
event begins to fade out, and the sources of catastrophe come into
view. In irony catastrophe is either arbitrary and meaningless,
X
Preface
the impact of an unconscious (or, in the pathetic fallacy, malig
nant) world on conscious man, or the result of more or less de
finable social and psychological forces. Tragedy's "this must be"
becomes irony's "this at least is," a concentration on foreground
facts and a rejection of mythical superstructures. Thus the ironic
drama is a vision of what in theology is called the fallen world.
[p. 285]
Well, yes, but how do you know all this? How did you decide? "Irony,
then, as it moves away from tragedy, begins to merge into comedy''
( p. 285). Perhaps, though I can think of other directions in which
many works everyone would call ironic have moved-as in fact Mr.
Frye at other points himself suggests.
How does he-how do we-know? Is there any way to get
hold of any corner of this large slippery subject with precision enough
to allow two readers to agree and to know how they have agreed? To
put the question in this form is to elect a rhetorical kind of inquiry,
and it is to make assumptions that should be stated openly from the
beginning.
I assume first that it is worthwhile to seek for as much clarity as a
murky subject in a murkier universe allows; if there is virtue in reveal
ing ambiguities beneath what looked like simplicities, there is also
value in discovering clarities beneath what looked like confusions. I
assume secondly that some ironies are written to be understood, and
that most readers will regret their own failures to understand. One
hears it said these days that understanding is not really possible in any
normative sense: each man constructs his own meanings, and the more
variety we have the richer we are. But I never find anyone in fact tol
erating all readings with equal cheer; critical practice assumes that
readers sometimes go astray. There is surely, then, some validity in the
notion of "going astray,'' and we can thus meaningfully pursue the
notion of finding one's way. Some readings are better than others, and
it is an impoverishment of the world to pretend otherwise.
But a third assumption is equally important: there are many
valid critical methods and there are thus many valid readings of any
literary work. I must stress this point from the beginning, because
when I come to particular readings I am often forced, seemingly by the
nature of the irony itself, to settle for a single reading. My air of cer
tainty at such points-so-and-so cannot not have been ironic, whereas
so-and-so as clearly must be taken straight-should always be seen in
the light of the question I am trying to ask and the methods I am using.
When I ask "What does it mean-is it ironic?" and try to show "how
I know,'' my answers clearly do not rule out-in fact I hope they invite
.
Xl
