WAYNE C. BOOTH A RHETORIC OF IRONY P641 $4.50 A RHETORIC OF IRONY Wayne C. Booth THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO AND LONDON "P.C. X 36" and "The Mote in the Middle Distance" from A Christmas Garland by Max Beerbohm. Reprinted by permission of William Heinemann Ltd. and E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. "Me, Them, and You·• from Abinger Harvest, copyright, 1936, 1964, by E. M. Forster. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Edward Arnold (Publishers) Limited. '"Warning to Children" by Robert Graves from Collected Poems, 1965. Copyright 1958, 1961 by Robert Graves. Reprinted by permission of the author and Collins Knowlton-Wing, Inc. "Hap" by Thomas Hardy from Collected Poems. Copyright 1925 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.; the Trustees of the Hardy Estate; Macmillan London & Basingstoke; and The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited. 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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO 60637 THE UNIVERSITY oF CHICAGO PRESS, Lm., LoNooN A II rights rcscn·cd. Published 1974. Sl'Co11d Impression 1975 Printed in the United States of A mcrica International Standard Book Number: 0-226-06552-9 (clothbound) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-87298 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 .. Vll 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