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« Irony has a frequent and common definition : saying what is contrary to what is meant (Quintilian 1995–98 [9.2.44], 401), a definition that is usually attributed to the first-century Roman orator Quintilian who was already looking back to Socrates and Ancient Greek literature. But this definition is so simple that it covers everything from simple figures of speech to entire historical epochs. Irony can mean as little as saying, ‘Another day in paradise’, when the weather is appalling. » (p.1)
« Plato’s Socrates has, from Quintilian to the present, been identified with the practice of irony. Socrates often spoke as though he were ignorant or respectful, precisely when he wished to expose his interlocutor’s ignorance. He would ask someone for the definition of friendship or justice and then allow the confident and ready definitions of everyday speech to be exposed in all their contradictory incompleteness. By demanding a definition from those who presented themselves as masters of wisdom, Socrates showed how some terms were less self-evident and definitive than everyday meaning would seem to suggest. It is no accident that Socrates used irony to challenge received knowledge and wisdom at a historical moment when the comfort and security of small communities were being threatened by political expansion and the inclusion of other cultures. The tribal cultures of Ancient Greece were opening out to imperial expansion and the inclusion of others. It is at this moment of cultural insecurity—in the transition from the closed community to a polis of competing viewpoints —that the concept of irony is formed. Eironeia is no longer lying or deceit but a complex rhetorical practice whereby one can say one thing —such as Socrates’ claim to be ignorant—but mean quite another, as when Socrates’ exposes the supposedly wise as lacking in all insight. Socrates tried to show that it is always possible that what we take to be the self-evident sense of a context or culture is far from obvious; it may be that what is being said is not meant. Today, despite its major differences, ‘postmodern’ irony also has this distancing function: we wear 1980s disco clothing or listen to 1970s country and western music, not because we are committed to particular styles or senses but because we have started to question sincerity and commitment in general; everything is as kitsch and dated as everything else, so all we can do is quote and dissimulate. But even in a world of postmodern irony, the very sense that everything is somehow quoted or simulated relies on a lost sense of the truly valuable or original. Both Socrates’ questions and the contemporary use of parody and quotation rely on distinguishing between those statements and actions that we genuinely intend and those that we repeat or mime only to expose their emptiness. » (p.2)
« The idea of past contexts that are meaningful in themselves but which are no longer ‘ours’ requires the ironic viewpoint of detachment. Through irony we can discern the meaning or sense of a context without participating in, or being committed to, that context. Hayden White (1973, 375) argues that the very notion of modern history is essentially ironic : for the historian must read the past as if there were some meaning of the past not apparent to the past itself. The past always means more than it explicitly ‘says’. The historian must not take the past at its word but always be other than the worlds she surveys. Furthermore, once we become aware of, and sensitive to, the notion of irony and specific historical contexts it becomes possible to read irony back into earlier texts. Irony destroys the immediacy and sincerity of life ; through irony we do not just live the meanings of our world, we can ask what these meanings are really saying. Not only, then, does irony share the fluidity and context-dependency of all general concepts ; it is the very notion of irony that allows us to think of competing and discontinuous contexts. » (p.3)
« Until the Renaissance, irony was theorised within rhetoric and was often listed as a type of allegory : as one way among others for saying one thing and meaning another. When the Greek and Latin descriptions of Socrates became available to Renaissance writers, irony was still not what it was to become for the Romantics (an attitude to existence). Irony was a rhetorical method. The Latin rhetorical manuals known in the Middle Ages had their origin in juridical and manifestly political situations ; they instructed how best to construct speeches for the purposes of defence, praise or public persuasion. There was very little that was ‘literary’ or creative in such uses of rhetoric. Ironia, as defined by those who followed Cicero and Quintilian, had little to do with creating an artful mode of self and consciousness. Ironia was a way of making what one said and meant more effective ; it was not a way of abstaining from belief or commitment. » (p.7)
« Since the nineteenth century, however, Socratic irony has come to mean more than just a figure of speech and refers to a capacity to remain distant and different from what is said in general. » (p.
« The figure of thought occurs when irony extends across a whole idea, and does not just involve the substitution of one word for its opposite. So, ‘Tony Blair is a saint’ is a figure of speech or verbal irony if we really think that Blair is a devil ; the word ‘saint’ substitutes for its opposite. ‘I must remember to invite you here more often’ would be a figure of thought, if I really meant to express my displeasure at your company. Here, the figure does not lie in the substitution of a word, but in the expression of an opposite sentiment or idea. When medieval and Renaissance writers were ironic, it was this local and rhetorical mode of irony that was employed : an irony that could be explained either through the substitution of a word for its opposite or as adopting, say, an expression of praise when derision is really implied. » (p.9)
« [D. H.] Green argues, the writer of romances would have occupied a distanced and critical position in relation to the courts and would have used irony to say implicitly what it might not have been politic to say outright. This is, of course, a crucial feature and possibility of irony in any age, but as Green notes, the conditions of court and patronage would have been particularly constraining on expression and would have been conducive to using indirect modes of expression such as irony. » (p.9)
« Many commentators on pre-modern irony give examples where praise is so excessive that it must be ironic. But if excessive rhetoric triggers this suspicion we would still require some confirmation or assumption about context to conclude that irony were present. What distinguishes an ironic use of excessive and contradictory rhetoric from a text that simply is excessive ? Green’s examples of medieval irony are all explained from the context of the narrative as a whole, what characters have said, or what the author (we assume) must have meant. Dilwyn Knox (1989), who also argues for the frequent use of irony in medieval literature, does, however, cite an example where such contextual clues were not read, and the obviously ironic text was read as sincere. The excessive and inappropriate praise did not arouse suspicion and, as a consequence, the text did not have its intended force and effect. The late medieval poem, Liber de Statu Curie, probably written between 1261 and 1265 by Magister Henricus Würzburg, is a dialogue that appears to praise the clergy and the holy city. The character Ganfridus assures his interlocutor of the honesty, safeness and integrity of Rome. He insists that the doctors charge moderately for their services, that the cardinals eat frugally and refuse all wine, and are generous to the poor and destitute. Now, two things need to be noted. The first is the excessiveness of the praise. Ganfridus is not offering a moderate defence ; indeed, he assumes the clergy and Rome to be beyond all reproach. To any astute reader who knows about the supposed corruption of the clergy at this time, such unquestioning praise will be obviously ironic. Second, the irony is signalled in the text, with the speaker lamenting that ‘hic fuit antiphrasis’—there has been antiphrasis, or saying what is contrary. Knox notes, however, that this conclusion was not in all texts, and was not in the copy lodged in the papal library of Eusebius IV. From this he concludes that the obvious irony was not always recognised. The text was read as a sincere praise of the clergy, and would need to be so if included in the papal library.
[…] Even the most ‘obvious’ ironies bear the possibility of not being read, and they do so precisely because of the contextual nature of irony. How could the papacy itself conclude that a eulogy of Rome was obviously ironic ? Irony, even at its most obvious, is always diagnostic and politica l: to read the irony you do not just have » (pp.11-12)
« Once we have the concept of complex irony, an irony that extends beyond a word or figure substituted within the text, we are capable of questioning the sincerity or authenticity of any text. To what extent can a text be controlled or governed by its original context ? When the Romantic poets argued that Milton’s devil was the hero of Paradise Lost (1667), and was so in spite of Milton’s intention (Wittreich 1991), they relied on the notion that a text has a force that is not reducible to what the author wanted to say. Milton may have wanted to present Satan as evil, but the force of the words that the character of Satan used had an appeal and implication well beyond Milton’s piety. By the same token, when we isolate irony in Homer, Chaucer or Shakespeare—even when those authors did not refer to their texts as ironic—we acknowledge that there must be clues for reading irony that go beyond authorial intent. Irony is just this capacity to consider a work as a text : as a production that is not reducible to conscious intent or the manifest work. But if we are to give irony any specificity we need to ask just how it is that we take some texts to mean what they say, and other texts to be other than, or distanced from, what they say. » (pp.13-14)
« We use the concept of irony in everyday and non-literary contexts. There are two broad uses in everyday parlance. The first relates to cosmic irony and has little to do with the play of language or figural speech. A Wimbledon commentator may say, ‘Ironically, it was the year that he was given a wild-card entry, and not as a seeded player, that the Croatian won the title.’ The irony here refers, like linguistic irony, to a doubleness of sense or meaning. It is as though there is the course of human events and intentions, involving our awarding of rankings and expectations, that exists alongside another order of fate beyond our predictions. This is an irony of situation, or an irony of existence ; it is as though human life and its understanding of the world is undercut by some other meaning or design beyond our powers. It is this form of irony that covers everything from statements such as, ‘Ironically, Australians are spending more than ever on weight-loss formulas while becoming increasingly obese’, to observations like, ‘The film ends ironically, with the music of the young and hopeful cellist played as we see her crippled and wasted body.’ In such cases, the word irony refers to the limits of human meaning ; we do not see the effects of what we do, the outcomes of our actions, or the forces that exceed our choices. Such irony is cosmic irony, or the irony of fate.
Related to cosmic irony, or the way the word ‘irony’ covers twists of fate in everyday life, is the more literary concept of dramatic or tragic irony. This is most intense when the audience knows what will happen, so that a character can be viewed from an almost God-like position where we see her at the mercy of the plot or destiny (Sedgwick 1935). If irony is taken in its broadest sense as a doubleness of meaning, where what is said is limited or undercut by what is implied, then we can start to include ironies that are not rhetorical, that have little to do with speech or language. Such ironies were not labelled as ironies until the nineteenth century (Thirlwall 1833, 490), but it is frequently argued that even ancient texts display this mode of irony. Tragic irony is exemplified in ancient drama and is intensified by the fact that most of the plots were mythic. The audience watched a drama unfold, already knowing its destined outcome. There was already a sense of irony or mourning in the predetermined plot, as though the drama could only unfold an already given destiny, as though the time when human action could be open and determining was already lost. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, for example, ‘we’ (the audience) can see what Oedipus is blind to. The man he murders is his father, but he does not know it. In so doing he not only does more than he intends, he also fulfils a destiny that he and the audience have heard at the opening of the play from the prophet Teirisias, but whose meaning only ‘we’ fully hear. » (pp.13-14)
« Dramatic, cosmic and tragic irony are ways of thinking about the relation between human intent and contrary outcomes. This sense of irony is related to verbal irony in that both share a notion of a meaning or intent beyond what we manifestly say or intend. In dramatic and cosmic irony this other meaning is plot or destiny. In verbal irony the other meaning is either what the speaker intends or what the hearer understands ; but how do we know just what this other meaning is ? » (p.15)
« We also, according to Booth’s account of irony, have to assume the value of textual coherence : it is because Swift expresses the argument in A Modest Proposal so clumsily—the proposal is anything but modest— that we assume he intended the text to be read ironically. Irony, for Booth, assumes a set of shared assumptions and the assumption of all communication : that we speak in order to be understood. » (p.17)
« Many have argued that our entire epoch, as postmodern, is ironic (Eco 1992; Hassan 1987, 91–2; Hutcheon 1994; Mileur 1998; Sim 2002; Wilde 1980). We no longer share common values and assumptions, nor do we believe there is a truth or reason behind our values; we always speak and write provisionally, for we cannot be fully committed to what we say. Usually, this form of postmodern irony is argued to be inherently politically liberating; because no common ground is assumed, a life marked by irony remains open and undetermined (Handwerk 1985; Lang 1988). But the extension of irony from being a local ‘trope’ within an otherwise literal language to characterise life and language in general has also served clearly conservative political tendencies, tendencies that have closed literature off from its political and cultural forces. At the very least, irony is elitist: to say one thing and mean another, or to say something contrary to what is understood, relies on the possibility that those who are not enlightened or privy to the context will be excluded. We might be able to argue that irony is inherently ethical precisely because it prompts us to look at the communal nature of language (Handwerk 1985); but we can also say that it is conservative to assume that there simply is a community. How many readers, today, would find Johnson’s example of irony, ‘Bolingbroke is a holy man’, so clearly ironic as to be exemplary? If we define irony as a clearly recognised figure of speech, then we need to question just how such communities of clear recognition are formed or assumed. » (p.18)
-Claire Colebrook, Irony, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, 191 pages.
