Wayne C. Booth. A Rhetoric of Irony, (1974).

Chapter 8: Reconstructing the Unreconstructable: Local Instabilities

Booth describes some categories of irony using three variables:

1. the degree of openness or disguise – irony can be covert or totally overt, ie “It is ironic that…”
2. the degree of stability in the reconstruction – can the reader be confident that his/her work is done when he has understood the irony?
3. the scope of the “truth revealed” – ranging from the local to the universal

Stable-Covert-Local

Here the meaning of irony is hidden but “firm as a rock” when discovered by the reader (235).

Stable-Overt

These statements assert an irony that the speaker has observed and wants to share:
Booth describes this irony in a diagram that creates this statement:
Isn’t it ironic that things are….
When we thought they were, or wished they were, like this…
They are REALLY LIKE THIS (238)

Unstable Irony

There is irony that resists that firm interpretation – “leaving the possibility, and in infinite ironies, that since the universe (or at least the universe of discourse) is inherently absurd, all statements are subject to ironic undermining” (241).

Booth asserts that wherever there are intentions, “however obscure or unconventional”, there are invitations to interpret (245). In unstable-overt-local ironies, we know that something is being undermined but we don’t know where to stop in our interpretations. In unstable-covert-local irony, there is no firm place to stand but the author still insists on a meaning.

Chapter 9: Infinite Instabilities

Infinite ironies assert that the universe is absurd and that nothing will stand up under ironic examination (253). Booth’s example of Robert Graves’ poem notes that the surface meaning is the meaning of the poem (Booth’s italics) – yet underlying the poem is a truth that Graves is trying to reach. But many modern authors reject using such an overt declaration of irony – and Booth turns to Beckett for an example. While Beckett’s work is often portrayed as “empty” of meaning, Booth notes that critics and readers have a strong emotional response to it.

Booth finishes by writing a final note on evaluation:

• “There can be no guidebook to tell us how much irony a work should contain; the artist himself will show us how much of it a work should contain and still succeed with us” (276).
• “Though in one sense it remains true that each reader must decide for himself the level of irony he will tolerate, once again we must say that there are just not that many levels to go around; we join authors and other readers even in our most private choices” (276).

A Theory of “Meaning Construction”

Meaning (“getting it”) is not a gift bestowed from above or a golden nugget to be excavated. Meaning is a consistent process that is, arguably, in action at all times a social being is functional. In A Rhetoric of Irony, Booth examines the reader’s process of constructing meaning when confronted with irony. Booth pinpoints irony as the topoi of his argument, not only to explicate the mechanics of irony, but also to reveal the strenuous, active nature of reading. All forms of reading require effort, yet certain linguistic forms, like figurative meaning, require vigorous attention.

Booth maps the positions and perspectives – the dance or winding journey – that the reader performs when deciphering irony. If this all seems too speculative, Booth uses a practical exercise as an example of the meaning process. At the end of the preface in A Rhetoric of Irony, he forces the reader to make a series of decisions regarding authorial intent:

De Man, however, quickly makes a critical turn that is “non-Boothean” in nature:

In one sense, De Man is warning against the use of evaluative criticism in lieu of close textual analysis. De Man wants more than this, he is also asking for the removal of ethos and pathos from textual analysis in favour of pure logos. Ironically, De Man’s plea for a “valueless” critical practice creates the very universalizing, totalization of meaning he claims to avoid. De Man ends up claiming that irony is the great disrupter of temporality, when this is only one function of irony out of vast array of functions.

If I may be so bold to ventriloquize Booth, he might ask De Man: “What made you decide on this meaning and not that? Why must irony be linked with a supernatural power to show truth and authenticity? Unlike De Man, Booth uses generalities carefully, and self-reflexively in order to avoid universalizing meaning. Booth’s generalities are usually found within “mind-maps” that are meant to guide us through a process, not drive us to a destination.

Booth’s “Mind Maps” for (Re)Constructing Ironic Meaning

Booth stays mainly within the realm of stable irony in his study. Stable irony is the author’s intentional use of irony. Booth discusses other kinds of irony – unstable, overt, covert, finite, infinite etc…- but stable irony is his main concern (seven chapters are spent on this topic). This is the form of irony that most closely connects with Booth’s over-arching project: how communities are formed through communication.

Booth’s first mind map concerns the author’s intention. When an author wants to a reader to recognize and then participate in irony, the author will leave signposts or markers that the reader must interpret. Booth describes four general marks of stable irony:

• Intentional or deliberate: designed to have an effect on the reader.
• Covert: “intended to be reconstructed with meaning different from those on the surface” (6).
• Secure the meaning: this marker creates an agreement with the reader to halt the proliferation of meaning.
• Local/finite meaning: stable ironies are not cosmic but set in a particular time and place (context).

By delineating these broad markers of stable irony, Booth is situating irony as an important function in the production of literary meaning, and, arguably, all meaning. When a reader recognizes these signposts, an assumed community of values is activated between reader, author and text. This set of complex contextual, linguistic and social functions are what Booth calls inferences. Booth argues that inferences thrive whenever meaning is enacted/created. He asks: if we are constantly using inferences to create meaning, how do inferences create irony?

In answer, Booth offers four steps of reconstruction that occur once the author’s signposts are recognized:

1. The reader is required to reject the literal meaning:

• This is not based on a disagreement with what the author is saying, or on the arbitrary addition of meanings.
• The rejection is based on an incongruity (between words or on a knowledge(s) brought into the mix)

2. The other meanings are “auditioned:”

• When there is a denial of the literal meaning, a decision is made regarding the viability of other meanings.
• Even a meaning based on the author’s sanity becomes a possibility, and will radically alter the deployment of meaning – however, this cannot come to pass unless steps 3 & 4 are enacted. These steps are not separate but intertwined.

3. The reader must decide how to judge the author based on knowledge of the author (i.e. the author’s belief systems). This a decision based on the author’s ethos, which is gathered from available information.

• This step is paramount since it directly impacts the next step.

4. Once the reader decides that the author is not mad or stupid, and that an ironic meaning is actually intended, then a multitude of possible meanings needs to be sorted.

• The meaning that most closely matches the beliefs the reader attributes to the author will be chosen.

The four steps of reconstruction provide a rudimentary outline of “a highly complex process that implies tearing down one habitat [of meaning] and building another in a different spot” (33). In the split second of recognition where one set of meanings is “destroyed” - there is displacement - and reconstruction begins. The old “house of meaning” is barely dismantled when the reader begins building another “house of meaning” to meet the demands of irony. Usually the ironic meaning is placed in a superior position above the rejected “literal” meaning. It is from this superior vantage point that the reader joins the author, and a host of readers, in the smug knowledge that they “got it.” A community is then created through the use of irony.

The Victim of Irony

Any meaningful discussion of irony must consider irony’s victim, and whether it is an essential component of irony for a victim to exist.

An analysis of some of the existing literature on the subject follows. In his Preface to a Rhetoric of Irony, Booth declares his indebtedness to D.C. Muecke (xiii), so Muecke is a good place to start.

Muecke explores many of the same themes and much of the same subject matter, as it relates to irony, that Booth does. Muecke does, however, explore the concept of irony’s victim in considerably more detail. “The typical victim of an ironic situation is essentially an innocent. Just as scepticism depends on belief-—we can only be sceptical of what someone believes, or might believe—so the irony of most ironic situations cannot exist without a complementary alazony. The alazon or victim is the person who blindly assumes that something is or is not the case, or confidently expects something to happen or not to happen; he does not even remotely suspect that things might not be as he supposes them to be, or might not turn out as he expects them to. This should not imply that that the victim is always so arrogantly confident or so wilfully blind that we feel he deserves what he gets. All that is necessary is the merest avoidable assumption on the part of the victim that he is not mistaken. For one of the odd things about irony is that it regards assumption as presumption and therefore innocence as guilt. Simple ignorance is safe from irony, but ignorance compounded with the least degree of confidence counts as intellectual hubris and is a punishable offence” (30).

The theme of ‘community’ runs throughout Booth’s works and is a dominant theme within A Rhetoric of Irony.

Muecke distinguishes between the object of irony and the victim of irony as follows:“The object of irony is what one is ironical about” (34).

Muecke uses Samuel Butler’s Erwhon to support his position: “As luck would have it, Providence was on my side.” The object of his irony was the doctrine of special Providence. “When Johnson wrote, ‘Bolingbroke was a holy man,’ Bolingbroke, though a person, was the object of his irony”. Muecke states that it would be a “blurring of distinctions to call him the victim of Johnson’s irony but it would not spoil one’s day” (34).“The object of irony may be a person (including the ironist himself), an attitude, a belief, a social custom or institution, a philisophical system, a religion, a whole civilization, or even life itself” (34).

“The victim of irony is the person whose ‘confident unawareness’ has directly involved him in an ironic situation” (34).

The “confident unawareness” of the three group members in relation to the t-shirts allowed them to be held out as victims of irony. Indeed, they were so confident that they were part of the community that is not irony’s victim that at no time did they find it unusual that all four shirts were not demonstrated prior to the presentation.

Back to the example of Johnson’s Bolingbroke: “If someone were to take Johnson’s remark about Bolingbroke seriously he would be a victim of irony. If Bolingbroke were discovered to be a holy man after all, Johnson would be a victim of irony. To the extent that Butler is presenting the hero of Erewhon not as being ironical but as being unconscious of the implicit contradictions in his statement, he is presenting him as the victim of irony” (34/35).

At this point, at least for this reader, the distinctions become somewhat blurred. Is Bolingbroke the victim or the object of irony? More to the point, if irony creates community, does it not require that the one community gets the irony and the other group doesn’t get the irony? It would seem, then, that those who do not get irony are, as a result, its victim.

According to Muecke, however, there are some instances of irony in which there appears to be neither a clear object nor a clear victim of irony. “Ezra Pound’s understatement, ‘Mutton cooked the week before last is, for the most part, unpalatable,’ can hardly be regarded as irony at the expense of the mutton, and there would be an air of desperation in the claim that there is always a hypothetical victim, the person who might conceivably take the statement seriously. Ezra Pound, of course, pretends to be speaking seriously, as all ironists do, and so might be called a pseudo-victim” (35).

I, on the other hand, might be considered a victim of Pound’s irony, as I simply don’t see the irony in the comment; victim or no.

Linda Hutchins writes in Irony’s Edge, that “irony always has a target; it sometimes also has what some want to call a victim” (p. 15).

Again, this is a fine distinction. The only difference between a target and a victim in my mind is when you miss the target… but the target was still your intended victim.

Muecke establishes different ways one may be a victim of irony

1) THOSE WHO, STRICTLY SPEAKING, ARE THE OBJECTS OF IRONY. These divide into two classes:

a) Those to whom one speaks ironically. Muecke here uses the example of Satan addressing the fallen angels in Book I of Paradise Lost.

b) Those of whom one speaks ironically. In this instance, Muecke uses an example from Northanger Abbey in a scene using Isabella Thorpe..

2) THOSE WHO ARE IN AN IRONIC SITUATION WITHOUT KNOWING IT

This is a large and varied class

a) Those unable to recognize they have been ironically addressed. Muecke uses an example from Pride and Prejudice and states: “When Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudicespeaks ironically his victims are frequently unaware of it.”

b) Those unable to recognize irony not directed against them. Here Muecke uses, collectively, the rest of the citizens in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson to demonstrate those unable to recognize irony directed against themselves.

c) Those unable to recognize that they are victims of circumstance or intrigue. Literature is replete with examples of this victim, Othello and Oedipus two of the most notable.

d) Those unable to recognize that their own words betray them. Shakespeare is once again plundered for a fine example of this victim in Polonius.

3) PEOPLE WHO KNOW THEY ARE IN AN IRONIC SITUATION

Here Muecke goes to the realm of the imagination for a suitable example. “Imagine a man who has been deprived of all that makes life worth living until, at last, when he is ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’, he becomes by some unexpected chance wealthy enough to indulge in his every sense. But the only sense remaining him (we shall imagine) is a sense of irony.” This person will undoubtedly see himself as a victim of an ironic situation. (pp. 35-39)

Now we will move on to Booth’s own study.

“A great deal has been made of the inevitable presence of victims, real or imagined, in all stable irony. But for several reasons this is slightly misleading. It is true that irony often presents overt victims: and, ironically, Booth once again uses the same examples that Muecke does in his Compass of Irony: Johnson’s “Bolingbroke was a holy man”; Kierkegaard’s “the audacious pen-strokes of recent philosophic investigators.”

It is also true that even in the most amiable irony one can always imagine a victim by conjuring up a reader or listener so naïve as not to catch the joke; no doubt in some uses of irony the fun of feeling superior to such imagined victims is highly important. But we need no very extensive survey of ironic examples to discover—unless we are choosing the examples to dramatize the use of victims—that the building of amiable communities is often far more important than the exclusion of naïve victims. Often the predominant emotion when reading stable ironies is that of joining, of finding and communing with kindred spirits.” (pp27/28)

There is, however, in my mind, no fun in joining a community or group that everyone can or does belong to. The pleasure in the communities that irony creates is, for me, the fact that there’s a group of people that just don’t get it.

This is supported by Hutchins in Irony’s Edge wherein she asks: “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. She goes on to note that

Booth lists five “crippling handicaps” which will lead a person to be a victim of irony:

1. Ignorance

2. Inability To Pay Attention

• Dumb down
• Because we are inundated with information, it is easy enough to be unprepared for a piece of irony when you encounter it, just due to lack of alertness.

3. Prejudice

• This is what I. A. Richards calls “doctrinal adhesions.” When a particular piece of writing violates your norms, you may be a victim of your own prejudices and be unable to detect irony…. the student of Booth’s that I like to call the Deer Hunter

4. Lack of Practice

• This is simply being the victim of inexperience. The more we are exposed to ironic works, the more easily we will detect them when we encounter them.

5. Emotional Inadequacy

• Being either overly sentimental or too “cold” or remote will hamper a person’s ability to detect irony (222-229).

And now a word from Northrop Frye.Booth makes the point that neither the implied author (regardless of whatever victimized masks he may have assumed in the work) nor the true implied reader are ever the victims of irony (233).

Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is a collection of essays which, in his own words, is “a trial or incomplete attempt, on the possibility of a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism.” (3). The text is divided into four main sections (not including the “Polemical Introduction” and “Tentative Conclusion”):

1. Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes;
2. Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols;
3. Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths; and
4. Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres.

This portion of the consideration of victim’s irony relies primarily on Frye’s Theory of Myths, specifically on the section related to "The Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire."

Frye goes back to the writing of Aristotle to demonstrate that if the main character in a piece of fiction is inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when a reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom. You can see as early as Aristotle how the sense of the ironic and victimization are closely linked, and they create a sense of community (216-217).

He adds that tragedy in the central or high-mimetic sense, is the fiction of the fall of a leader (he has to fall because that is the only way in which a leader can be isolated from his society), mingles the heroic with the ironic.

In tragic irony, irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be.

Thus the figure of a typical or random victim begins to crystallize in domestic tragedy as it deepens in ironic tone. We may call this typical victim the pharmakos or scapegoat.

The pharmakos is neither innocent nor guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes; he is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence.

In ironic comedy we begin to see that art has also a lower limit in actual life. This is the condition of savagery, the world in which comedy consists of inflicting pain on a helpless victim, and tragedy in enduring it. Ironic comedy brings us to the figure of the scapegoat ritual and the nightmare dream.

Frye writes that

While there is no universal agreement that there is always a victim of irony, there does seem to be general agreement that irony creates community. Community implies exclusion: If everyone belongs, can it still be considered a community? This in itself does not indicate that there needs to be a victim, but I would argue that the nature of irony, and the communities it creates, requires a community of victims.

The act of enclosing Wayne Booth’s thought in a neatly packaged conclusion is like trying to close Pandora’s box: it is simply not going to happen. Booth opens the literary equivalent to Pandora’s box in A Rhetoric of Irony. Unlike Pandora’s box, Irony is not the source of all man’s woes, but irony can cause frustration and consternation that only Boothian hope can cure. Boothian hope involves trying to sort out life’s riddles, not solve them. Hope in Booth’s terms involves placing value on how to live effectively with each other. The act of building effective relationships is fuelled through stories. Narrative, of all kinds, is how we create the interstitial tissue that binds the body politic together. Irony is one essential ingredient in the formation of this fleshy connection. This is a much more philosophically and epistemologically based conception of irony than most “scholars of irony” have previously attempted. For Booth, irony causes the most consternation when scholars try to pigeonhole irony into a narrow definition. Booth urges us to see beyond static definitions and enter into the kinetic act of interpretation.

Booth’s hermeneutical inquiry into irony opens a world of interpretive possibility by showing us how ironic meaning functions. When we view the schematics of irony, then we are able to process irony more responsibly and, hopefully, more often. In other words, Booth helps us to “get it” and to interpret “it” within a larger reading community.

Of course, there are people who will not get it – this is perhaps the one section of the text that offers prescriptions for the “irony-impaired.” Booth not only displays irony’s place in the topography of human communication, but also offers suggestions (not solutions) on how to repair the intellectual intercourse we engage in: an intercourse that, all too often, is barren and fruitless.

Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text: Roland Barthes Essays. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana 1977, 142-148.