Irony's Edge

The Theory and Politics of Irony

Linda Hutcheon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134937547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The edge of irony, says Linda Hutcheon, is always a social and political edge. Irony depends upon interpretation; it happens in the tricky, unpredictable space between expression and understanding. Irony's Edge is a fascinating, compulsively readable study of the myriad forms and the effects of irony. It sets out, for the first time, a sustained, clear analysis of the theory and the political contexts of irony, using a wide range of references from contemporary culture. Examples extend from Madonna to Wagner, from a clever quip in conversation to a contentious exhibition in a museum. Irony's Edge outlines and then challenges all the major existing theories of irony, providing the most comprehensive and critically challengin theory of irony to date.

1
RISKY BUSINESS

The “transideological” politics of irony

There is no correct understanding of the word irony, no historically valid reading of irony…

Joseph Dane, The Critical Mythology of Irony

The word “irony” does not now mean only what it meant in earlier centuries, it does not mean in one country all it may mean in another, nor in the street what it may mean in the study, nor to one scholar what it may mean to another.

D.C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic

I begin with these daunting assertions as a kind of warning, to myself as much as to you. I am obviously neither the first nor the last to show an interest in irony, the mode of the unsaid, the unheard, the unseen: in Western cultures it has always fascinated theorists, critics, and artists alike. Its history has been rehearsed often, as I suggested in the introduction, and there is surprisingly little disagreement as to its basic definition (see Karstetter 1964: 162–70; N. Knox 1973), both in classical rhetoric and in subsequent literary and philosophical extensions of the term (see Dane 1991; Schoentjes 1993). Irony has certainly been called the “child of Janus, god of beginnings, and without doubt the most ill-behaved of all literary tropes” (States 1971 :3). Nevertheless, ours joins just about every other century in wanting to call itself the “age of irony,” and the recurrence of that historical claim in itself might well support the contention of contemporary theorists from Jacques Derrida to Kenneth Burke that irony is inherent in signification, in its deferrals and in its negations.

Yet most people feel there is something faintly (or even strongly) suspect about irony, at least as others use it. Is that because verbal irony is “language giving the lie to itself yet still relishing its power” (Hartman 1981: 146)? The suspicion of deceit that accompanies indirection, especially when combined with the idea of power, understandably makes for a certain unease. That irony can be used as a weapon has always been known: the social put-down and the satiric barb have their corollary even in the critics’ wielding of authority over texts (and especially over previous imperceptive readers) through their attribution of irony (Dane 1991: 6, 156–7; Booth 1970: 329). Perhaps it is what I want to call the “edge” that irony possesses in its verbal and structural forms that makes the stakes higher here than, say, in the use of metonymy. Even situational irony (and, with it, things like the irony of fate, cosmic irony, and so on) would not seem to provoke quite the same worries (cf. Glicksberg 1969), but verbal and structural ironies seem to be either deplored or prized, depending on how and in whose interest they are seen to operate. This too makes people uneasy, for if “[i]rony’s guns face in every direction” (D.J. Enright 1986: 110), then anyone might come under fire. It is almost as though, in ethical terms, irony were inscrutable (Tittler 1984: 20). But it might not hurt to recall that no epistemological (Kenshur 1988: 347) or ideological (Hirst 1976: 396–7) position is ever intrinsically either right or wrong, either dangerous or safe, either reactionary or progressive. And the ironic stance is no exception.

There is nothing intrinsically subversive about ironic skepticism or about any such self-questioning, “internally dialogized” mode (LaCapra 1985: 119); there is no necessary relationship between irony and radical politics or even radical formal innovation (Nichols 1981: 65). Irony has often been used to reinforce rather than to question established attitudes (cf. Moser 1984: 414), as the history of satire illustrates so well. And this, the “transideological” (White 1973: 38) nature of irony, is the focus of this book: irony can and does function tactically in the service of a wide range of political positions, legitimating or undercutting a wide variety of interests. It is this focus that has determined what, in the Introduction, I called the “scene” of irony in this particular study.

Ever since irony as a word and concept came to the attention of ancient Greek culture, there have been arguments about how irony works and what its scope is or could be. Does “irony” refer to a word with implied different meaning or is it an entire manner of speaking? In other words, is it a trope or a figure? Could it be both? (See Quintilian 1977:9.2.45–6.) My particular interest in the transideological politics of irony is what suggested to me the need for an approach to irony that would treat it not as a limited rhetorical trope or as an extended attitude to life, but as a discursive strategy operating at the level of language (verbal) or form (musical, visual, textual). This choice of discourse as the scope and site of discussion is also intended to ensure a consideration of the social and interactive dimensions of irony’s functioning, whether the situation be a conversation or the reading of a novel (Krysinski 1985: 1; Warning 1982: 256).

But who are the participants in this social act called “irony”? The party line says that there is an intending “ironist” and her/his intended audiences—the one that “gets” and the one that doesn’t “get” the irony. What do you do, then, with the obvious fact that ironies exist that are not intended, but are most certainly interpreted as such? Similarly, there are ironies you might intend, as ironist, but which remain unperceived by others. Irony’s indirection complicates considerably the various existing models of intersubjective communication between a speaker and a hearer (see Hernadi 1988: 749; Adams 1985: 1). With irony, there are, instead, dynamic and plural relations among the text or utterance (and its context), the so-called ironist, the interpreter, and the circumstances surrounding the discursive situation; it is these that mess up neat theories of irony that see the task of the interpreter simply as one of decoding or reconstructing some “real” meaning (usually named as the “ironic” one) (Booth 1974; Karstetter 1964), a meaning that is hidden, but deemed accessible, behind the stated one. If this were actually the case, irony’s politics would be much less contentious, I suspect.

The major players in the ironic game are indeed the interpreter and the ironist. The interpreter may—or may not—be the intended addressee of the ironist’s utterance, but s/he (by definition) is the one who attributes irony and then interprets it: in other words, the one who decides whether the utterance is ironic (or not), and then what particular ironic meaning it might have. This process occurs regardless of the intentions of the ironist (and makes me wonder who really should be designated as the “ironist”). This is why irony is “risky business” (Fish 1983: 176): there is no guarantee that the interpreter will “get” the irony in the same way as it was intended. In fact, “get” may be an inaccurate and even inappropriate verb: “make” would be much more precise. As I will argue in Chapter 5, this productive, active process of attribution and interpretation itself involves an intentional act, one of inference.

The person usually called the “ironist,” though, is the one who intends to set up an ironic relation between the said and the unsaid, but may not always succeed in communicating that intention (or the relation). The complex reasons why this might occur form one of the subjects of this book. Irony, then, will mean different things to the different players. From the point of view of the interpreter, irony is an interpretive and intentional move: it is the making or inferring of meaning in addition to and different from 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. However, from the point of view of what I too (with reservations) will call the ironist, irony is the intentional transmission of both information and evaluative attitude other than what is explicitly presented.

It is not without nervousness and self-consciousness that I raise issues of intentionality in a post-Derridean, post-Barthesian, and post-Foucaultian age. But in the study of irony’s edge, it seems to me to be unavoidable. After all, the touchy political issues that arise around irony’s usage and interpretation invariably focus on the issue of intention (of either ironist or interpreter). And it is because of its very foregrounding of the politics of human agency in this way that irony has become an important strategy of oppositional rhetoric. Much previous theorizing of irony’s functioning has been done, explicitly or implicitly, primarily from the point of view of the ironist (Muecke 1969 and 1970/1982; Booth 1974; Hirsch 1971: 1193). When irony is considered as a speech act, it is once again the role of the intending speaker that tends to ground analysis (Grice 1975; Amante 1981; Groeben and Scheele 1984; Bach and Harnish 1979). And yet, both intention and agency are involved in the activity of the interpreter as well. One of the significations of the verb “to mean” is “to intend” (Wilson 1992: 165), but interpreters “mean” as much as ironists do, and often in opposition to them: to attribute irony where it is intended—and where it is not—or to refuse to attribute irony where it might be intended is also the act of a conscious agent. This agent is engaged in a complicated interpretive process (Hagen 1992: 11, 20) that involves not only the making of meaning but the construction of a sense of the evaluative attitude displayed by the text toward what is said and what is not said. The interpreter’s job, therefore, cannot simply be one of somehow “rightly comprehending” (Furst 1984: 14) the ironist’s intention or the text’s signals. Whether irony is “present” in a text or “found” there (Steig 1989: 21) is another question this study explicitly addresses.

The interpreter as agent performs an act—attributes both meanings and motives—and does so in a particular situation and context, for a particular purpose, and with particular means. Attributing irony involves, then, both semantic and evaluative inferences. Irony’s appraising edge is never absent and, indeed, is what makes irony work differently from other forms which it might structurally seem to resemble (metaphor, allegory, puns). As the second part of Chapter 2 explores, this is the case whether its tone be gently teasing or devastatingly harsh, whether its inferred motive be benign playfulness or corrosive critique. The semantic dimension of irony is difficult to treat in isolation, without keeping not only “one eye on the receiver, but the other on the surrounding tension-filled environments” (Collins 1989: 79). From the point of view of its discursive politics, the one thing irony would not seem to be is what it is usually claimed to be: a simple antiphrastic substitution of the unsaid (called the “ironic” meaning) for its opposite, the said (called the “literal” meaning)—which is then either “set aside” (Fish 1983: 189; Searle 1979b) or sometimes only “partially effaced” (Tittler 1984: 21). Once again, I think the political problems of irony would be relatively straightforward if this were in fact the case.

The third chapter will argue in detail that irony “happens”—and that is the verb I think best describes the process. It happens in the space between (and including) the said and the unsaid; it needs both to happen. What I want to call the “ironic” meaning is inclusive and relational: the said and the unsaid coexist for the interpreter, and each has meaning in relation to the other because they literally “interact” (Burke 1969a: 512) to create the real “ironic” meaning. The “ironic” meaning is not, then, simply the unsaid meaning, and the unsaid is not always a simple inversion or opposite of the said (Amante 1981:81; Eco 1990: 210): it is always different—other than and more than the said. This is why irony cannot be trusted (Kenner 1986: 1152): it undermines stated meaning by removing the semantic security of “one signifier : one signified” and by revealing the complex inclusive, relational and differential nature of ironic meaning-making. If you will pardon the inelegant terms, irony can only “complexify”; it can never “disambiguate,” and the frustration this elicits is among the many reasons why it is difficult to treat the semantics of irony separately from its syntactics or pragmatics (Plett 1982: 76), its circumstances (textual and contextual) or its conditions of use and reception.

The story—of both chapter and book—thus far, then: the attributing of irony to a text or utterance is a complex intentional act on the part of the interpreter, one that has both semantic and evaluative dimensions, in addition to the possible inferring of ironist intent (from either the text or statements by the ironist). This study argues that irony happens as part of a communicative process; it is not a static rhetorical tool to be deployed, but itself comes into being in the relations between meanings, but also between people and utterances and, sometimes, between intentions and interpretations. Like me, you will be able to provide many personal examples of the complexity of this process and the possible consequences of that complexity, examples from your daily lives that vary from misfired quips to serious puzzlement over, say, an art exhibit you visit. I recall seeing the large-scale, parodic paintings of Attila Richard Lukacs for the first time and, despite having read about his work (Dompierre 1989), I truly didn’t know how to “read” the gay artist’s large, irreverent tableaux that figure more or less naked skinheads within visual contexts borrowed from both Nazi iconography and the history of art. I knew that the resulting clash of cultures and associations was almost invariably seen as ironic by reviewers, but I didn’t know how to go about interpreting the specific meaning of these ironies. For one thing, the cultural connotations of skinheads were plural and even contradictory for me—and possibly for you too. Do you think of racist violence and white supremacism? I did, especially in a contemporary German context—and, though Canadian, Lukacs lives and works in Berlin. Or are your associations more with the rebellion born of the hopelessness of economic deprivation? As one critic put it: “are they neo-nazis, proletarian heroes, gay-bashers or available homosexuals?” (R. Enright 1992: 14). Lukacs may insist on his intention to be critical: “I know my work deals with elements of fascism but I think if anyone with a two-bit mind looks at the work, he would see that it’s more of a comment against it” (in R. Enright 1992: 25). Fascism, he says, is associated with violence, power and evil; it is out there and has to be dealt with. And so it is. But how the resulting work is interpreted by viewers like me is not totally within the artist’s control, whatever his intentions. Where one viewer saw “criticality and radicalism” (Dompierre 1989: 11) in his work, another saw it as “part fetish arena, part history painting” (R. Enright 1992: 14).

I should have thought that I was primed, in a way, to make irony happen in Lukacs’s work by the similarities between his strategies (of size and choice of gay-coded intertexts) and those of other artists, such as photographers Yasumasa Morimura and Evergon, who also recall the history of art in their work and, through ironic alterations, recode its gendered representations in gay male terms. And, after all, the relation between irony and “gay sensibility” has been argued frequently (see Sontag 1982: 105–19; Pronger 1990: 104), though today some see the irony of camp as “cheap,” as more “an excuse not to grow up” than any form of protest (Headlam 1993/1994: 88). It was the juxtaposition of the formal echoing of previous art (some of it, like that of Caravaggio, with clear homosexual connotations) with the neo-Nazi associations of the subject matter that proved intractable for me, however. What might indeed have been intended as ironic critique remained for me merely ambiguous and unsettling, though none the less powerful for that.

When the political dimensions are as overt as they are in Lukacs’s even more recent homoerotic work which echoes the visual style of National Socialist “worker” art, the potential problems that collect around attributing and intending irony are pretty evident, even if they are also complex. But I think there are always going to be potential problems with any use of irony: “between the intended irony that goes unperceived and the unintended that becomes irony by being perceived, there is room for many kinds and degrees of misunderstanding, misfire, and fizzle, as well as of understanding and complicity” (Chambers 1990: 19). With irony, you move out of the realm of the true and false and into the realm of the felicitous and infelicitous—in ways that go well beyond what is suggested by the use of these terms in speech-act theory (Austin 1975; Felman 1983; Pratt 1977). Irony removes the security that words mean only what they say. So too does lying, of course, and that is why the ethical as well as the political are never far beneath the surface in discussions of the use of and responses to irony. It has even been called a kind of “intellectual tear-gas that breaks the nerves and paralyzes the muscles of everyone in its vicinity, an acid that will corrode healthy as well as decayed tissues” (Northrop Frye, cited in Ayre 1989:183). Irony obviously makes people uneasy. It is said to disavow (Kaufer 1981a: 25) and to devalorize (Ramazani 1988: 12), usually because it distances.

In fact, perhaps the most oft-repeated remark about irony—made both by those who approve and by those who disapprove of it—is about its emotional ethics, so to speak. They say that it is a mode of intellectual detachment (Schoentjes 1993: 153–86), that “irony engages the intellect rather than the emotions” (Walker 1990: 24). But the degrees of unease irony provokes might suggest quite the opposite. Irony is said to irritate “because it denies us our certainties by unmasking the world as an ambiguity” (Kundera 1986: 134). But it can also mock, attack, and ridicule; it can exclude, embarrass and humiliate. That too may irritate, and not at a terribly intellectual level either. Yet, irony has consistently been seen as a favored trope of the intellectual and, therefore, a commentator on Irish nationalism can assert that “it is hard to summon much of it [irony] when you have been blinded by a British army rubber bullet,” and ask: “How is such irony not simply to defuse our anger?” (Eagleton 1988: 8). But the very long history of irony’s deployment in satire and invective might suggest the possibility, less of a defusing, than of an engaging of precisely that anger. Irony always has an edge; it sometimes has a “sting” (Gutwirth 1993: 144). In other words, this study argues that there is an affective “charge” to irony that cannot be ignored and that cannot be separated from its politics of use if it is to account for the range of emotional response (from anger to delight) and the various degrees of motivation and proximity (from distanced detachment to passionate engagement). Sometimes irony can indeed be interpreted as a withdrawal of affect; sometimes, however, there is a deliberate engaging of emotion. As the final chapter will show, any use of irony or, for that matter, any discussion of the politics of irony that ignores either irony’s edge or this wide and complex range of affective possibilities does so at its peril.

Unlike synecdoche, say, irony always has a “target”; it sometimes also has what some want to call a “victim.” As the connotations of those two terms imply, irony’s edge is often a cutting one. Those who might not attribute irony where it was intended (or where others did) risk exclusion and embarrassment. In other words, even the simplest social dimensions of irony frequently involve an affective component. And, of course, irony might be deemed appropriate only for certain topics or certain audiences; it might not be accepted as fit for use in a particular place or at a particular time. Again, as the final chapter’s examination of a contentious museum exhibition will illustrate, any such violation of (even unspoken) conventions can also result in strong reactions with serious consequences. And yet, there are many situations in which it might actually be prudent and tactful to use indirect forms of address like irony (Holdcroft 1976: 147), just as there are others in which they would be provocative and transgressive.

Needless to say, irony can be provocative when its politics are conservative or authoritarian as easily as when its politics are oppositional and subversive: it depends on who is using/attributing it and at whose expense it is seen to be. Such is the transideological nature of irony. Since this is the focus of the entire study, a few examples and an overview of the different ways in which irony can be considered transideological in its politics are in order. My operating premise here is that nothing is ever guaranteed at the politicized scene of irony. Even if an ironist intends an irony to be interpreted in an oppositional framework, there is no guarantee that this subver...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The “Scene” of Irony
• 1. Risky Business: The Transideological” Politics “ of Irony
• 2. The Cutting Edge
• 3. Modeling Meaning: The Semantics of Irony
• 4. Discursive Communities: How Irony “Happens”
• 5. Intention and Interpretation: Irony and the Eye of The Beholder
• 6. Frame-Ups and Their Marks: The Recognition or Attribution of Irony
• 7. The End(s) of Irony: The Politics of Appropriateness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index