Isn't it ironic?

Wikipedia quotes Fowler on irony:

"Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware, both of that 'more' and of the outsider's incomprehension."

Fowler is, of course, right, and he puts his finger on the heart of irony, which is that the ironist knows that they are being ironic.

Because of its use as a device in playwriting, where "dramatic irony" is a situation in which the audience knows that a character's fate is other than the character believes, it has come to mean something like "a turn-up for the books". Alanis Morissette's much mocked song used it to mean exactly this. Any pretensions she might have had to being a decent writer probably disappeared with that effort. It is much used in that way, though

This has led some lesser lights to believe that "irony" as a figure of speech means something like "that doesn't mean what you think it does". It should be clear that this is actually the opposite of what "irony" does mean, because the ironist is saying "this doesn't mean what it says it does".

The Zoe Williams article referenced by Wikipedia is quite interesting, if often wrong (like much of Williams' work - she's clever, but far too lazy to bother thinking about anything), but she was right to note that it is a problem that "rhetorical irony expands to cover any disjunction at all between language and meaning, with a couple of key exceptions". It oughtn't. We have, as she notes, other words for that.

It's quite simple, really. The ironist says "I'm lying." and usually adds "For fun." A dramatic irony is a situation in which characters have false beliefs that are exposed. The playwright is lying. Usually for fun.

Irony is possible in the novel, of course. Time's Arrow springs to mind. Dr Friendly's life is ironic. He thinks he's a nice guy, bringing people to life. We know that he's an SS doctor living his life backwards. Amis cutely (although none too originally) makes an ironic statement. It's not wholly successful, but it's, as so often with Amis, engagingly well written.

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:01 am