What Is Irony? (fiction) — Michael Farrell

A voice had told me which room to enter. ‘Declare it,’ I had said to myself, like an Indian king, by which I had meant, get it down, in a story, any story. It was the pigeon room. I was alone in there for once, with the pigeons: I had seen four, who were more like some kind of blue gull, cum ground bird, with flat backs. I was surprised that they hadn’t been trodden to death, with all the foot traffic. I gave them the rest of my apple, which was mostly core, and they had eaten it like they were starving. Maybe they were, but it was more likely, I had thought, that they weren’t. I had been talking to a friend about teaching literature, and the conversation had culminated in his inviting me to give a guest lecture, on irony. ‘We can read irony in any text’, I had then said. ‘“The cat sat on the mat”, might be ironic in a number of ways: in could be a dramatically ironic text, if we knew anything about the context of the mat, that the cat did not. For example, if we knew that the mat belonged to a dog, of if it was in some way not suitable for sitting on, because it was mucky, or covered in fleas, or hanging vertically, or even missing, or if we knew that the cat was incapable of sitting, due to injury, perhaps, or if there was no ‘the’ cat, because there were many cats in the context (in which case, irony would redound upon the speaker, as perhaps it would in other cases already mentioned, rather than on the cat), or likewise, if there were one cat and many mats. Irony was always contextual: the statement would be ironically difficult, if those being addressed by it were not English speakers. The addressee might have been a cat, who did not conform to the statement, which might have been read – or heard – as a direction. The statement may have been made as not referring to a cat that sat on a mat, at all, if it was given as an emblematic statement of something basic, regarding English – or even a context that was not language-based. It might have been said, in a fabulous, or folklore, realm, where rhyming had been outlawed. It might, moreover, be juxtaposed to a more eloquent, and philosophical, statement that preceded or followed it. In reading literature, we would also, normally, read a sentence in relation to the sentences that preceded it and followed it: unless it was the first sentence of a text, in which case we were still likely to have read it in the context of the (most basic paratexts of) author, its (implicit or explicit) genre, and title, before we began to consider what followed. I was afraid that I might have made irony seem like a bunch of abstract, unusual, and or pointless situations. When I had first learned about irony, I had understood it as indicating something being intended other that what appeared to be said. It had taken me a long while to realise that, rather than reducing texts to (often negative) observations that suited the speaker, irony was an enriching aspect of language, that, in concert with voices, allowed multiple meanings to exist. The opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was an example of irony that was routinely given. Once having read the novel, we had a richer understanding of the sentence’s ambiguities. It was not normal, when we had first read a novel’s first sentence, to ponder the resonances and possibilities of it: we wanted to get on, find out what it was all about, read the proceeding sentences that made up the first page, and turn it, get onto the second one. Austen’s sentence was in three parts, separated by commas. The first phrase, “It is a truth universally acknowledged …” might be read, in isolation, as ironic: We might have stopped reading, and asked ourselves: were there any truths that were universally acknowledged? Perhaps a religious tract of the eighteenth century might have said that it was so. Perhaps a mathematical textbook might have. Given that Pride and Prejudice was neither, was it likely that Austen would have availed herself of an orthodox religious statement, such as ‘God exists’, for instance, or that 2+2=4 (why not 1+1=2, or 3+3=6)? Either would have seemed to foreclose (fictional) reality in some way. Even if these were statements that were universally accepted in Austen’s fictional milieu, were either of these things universally acknowledged? There was an evocation of public admission about the term acknowledgment, that didn’t quite fit with English middleclass society, in relation to its devotions, nor, any more so, with its practice of maths. If we knew anything about the representations of such a society, especially in its comic mode, then we might have expected that the narrator of this sentence was gesturing towards, in a very general way, the consensus of much talk, or to put it more Latinately, conversation. It was an author’s deployment of irony that to a great extent marked, their strength (or excellence, if you preferred), had been my thought, although that was a truth that was not universally acknowledged. I had thought that with irony, if you were wondering, but whether it could be said that I had typed the thought with irony, I wasn’t so sure. How did the irony get from the mind through the fingers to the screen (I had not composed onto paper for some years): did it get a free ride with the words, like a virus? Or was it attached, more generally, to language rather than words per se: irony being something we read, generally, as being legible in units larger than words; could it be said, for instance, that there were any unironic moments in Pride and Prejudice? It had occurred to me, momentarily, to describe irony as being whiskey-flavoured, but while I had drunk whiskey very occasionally at a younger age, I was now, however, sober, a fact that some had found ironic in a poet. I had, meanwhile, been inclined to think that representations of drinking whiskey were often accompanied by a pretentious affect, as were representations of poets: as if drinking whiskey was somehow soulful, like being a poet was. All this adult image-paraphernalia aside, we only needed to look at some of the sketches of Sesame Street, or at The Simpsons, shows that children have watched for decades, to find irony landing everywhere. It was a traditional aspect of comedy, that of the irony of everyone around a simpler person, who didn’t appreciate their irony (a subset of dramatic irony, in that dramatic irony need not be comic: it can be suspenseful, or tragic, if a character is in danger, or doomed). Sometimes it made them feel bad – they had recognised, on some level, that they were the butt of a joke, but they didn’t understand why. But irony was not the preserve of comedy – and we might need to leave the rest of Austen’s sentence unexamined for now – but it could be a tutorial topic – nor of the middle classes. We could consider Hamlet, especially the character of Hamlet, a Danish prince. Yet a play was, to some extent, reinterpreted new each time it was played. And if all the other roles were not to be played as two-dimensional villains, or dupes, then there may be irony involved in constituting all the characters (likewise, arguably, in Austen). Yet perhaps Hamlet was readable as a tragicomedy, or, broadly, as a human comedy, in Balzac’s sense: what was the point of so much fretting and indecision, and chicanery, and yes, villainy, and propriety, when they (almost) all ended up dead in what seemed, ultimately, like pretty short shrift. Take a leaf, audience, out of this book, Shakespeare might well have been saying. I thought (and wrote, as you could see) that I would go back to Austen’s sentence after all, because there seemed to be a link between Hamlet, and the subject of her complete first sentence, which ran: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’. It was conventionally given as an example of irony, as I had said earlier, because it meant, it was said, the opposite of what it said, and that that opposite (that is, of potential wives in pursuit of a man with good fortune) is what serious readers perceived it as having said, or meant (although really, perhaps what was meant is rereaders, because a truth projected onto a single man by the families of those with marriageable daughters, or at least, legally viable daughters, was a meaning which I thought would be a bit ambitious to construe for someone who had stopped at the first sentence and gone no further) but this interpretation was just a bit too simplistic, cynical, and self-congratulatory, in my view. This lecture was itself another ironic text, and would be more ironic if it were given to a class of uninterested, no-brains, but Professor Jolimont had assured me, and I further assure readers that he did so, that the students that attended his lecture were overwhelmingly interested in the lifelong riches of literature and its permutations. How did we read ironically? Not by reading skeptically, never taking the words at face value, but, rather by remaining open to a sense of double meaning in the voice of the speaker. We grew accustomed to this with training, and the only training, really, was reading, thoughtful reading. We were not going to read every sentence of a novel weighing its double, or multiple meanings. Literature was not constituted completely of fiction (or drama), either. When we read lyric poems, and reread it in the context of producing critical essays, we tended to read the whole text again and again. While reading a novel five times or more might be some kind of ideal, in terms of producing distance, immersion, insight, or whatever, realistically you (and I) were not going to do that. With a poem the length of a page or two, however, multiple readings were easily achieved. I had the idea that Austen might be practiced with. Now a poem was not merely ‘chopped-up prose’, as you would have found, if you had looked, that early practitioners of free verse were accused of (and perhaps why some nervously –my projection – included some chopped up metrical lines in with their free ones) but they should have held their horses for the twenty-first century, when such poetry became virtually de rigeur: except that no one minded anymore. Perhaps we could have blamed John Cage, or ten million overproduced pop records. But we were not expecting a good poem, although there was a place for bad writing in education, and a place for plagiarism – indeed an opportunity – too. If the text that you were writing was being written for the benefit of your practice only, then it didn’t matter what you did. If it was for someone to read, then that was a different matter. That was an ethical situation: and was not as simple as saying to yourself, I had paid my fees, and Professor Jolimont had been paid to read my writing, therefore it didn’t matter what I had handed in. The professor had a right to expect you to make an effort, for one thing: that was part of the contract of being in the Professor’s class. You had a right to expect yourself to have made an effort, also. Regardless of whether you ended up reviewing books for a living, which was unlikely, but possible, or teaching literature, which was slightly more likely because it was actually a living, if you had secured employment, or high school English, even more likely, even if it was something you had to fall back on after trying some other things that had seemed easier or more fun, but ultimately weren’t, or if you had continued to work at something that was not directly related to the course, but like, in probability, all jobs, that required thinking, reading, interpreting, and writing, you didn’t want to be in the passive aggressive position of feeling less trained, less expert than you could be, and (inevitably?) looking for someone to blame. That was not something to look forward to in life. The professor was a person, too: they did (had done) this job because it was meaningful, and rewarding, and because they appreciated literature, and they, further, appreciated being part of a milieu where the appreciation of literature was supported, or in other words, they appreciated other appreciators, and enjoyed bringing others to like appreciation. But these joys and meanings were relative. The harder the students worked, the more the Professor – and your tutors – and your fellow students, too – because you were not yet in the one-to-one supervision relation of honours, or of a PhD – enjoyed what they did and found it meaningful, and gave more back and lived better lives without depression or burnout. It would have been ironic to be interested in labour politics and to not have cared about your own teachers’ labour. This would have been, on my part, a weak form of irony because I would have been generalising and projecting, and not citing any students’ own actual words and thoughts (about labour politics) which I wouldn’t have known. I was pretty sure, though, that I had known that no one there that thought that this course should have long been defunded, despite statements in parliament which had received some broader approval recently. Perhaps by now you were wondering if lectures were ethical because they seemed so one-way, and that was a good critical thought, perhaps one to have thought about, and then discussed with the Professor, because I had been going to make a final reductive comment about labour and irony and that was, that I was not on salary, so I would have been paid $200 or an Amazon voucher to have prepared and given this lecture. So you must have done it for the lolz might have been your next thought, if you were cynical or bitter enough, and I was not actually complaining about the possibility of such comments being made, because any critical work on a subject that interested me progressed (ugh, but what a disgusting verb) my thought on that subject. But even though I had kept digressing from my subject, I was doing my best, and maybe repeating things that the Professor had said, but repetition was an aid to memory. Who would have thought that I would have ever given such a lecture? A fake Professor in a real university. While such situational irony might have seemed to be participating in the negative reductive version that we were trying to dislodge, the point was to see the situation differently. I would once have been an unlikely person to give this lecture, but the (positional?) irony was that I would also have been a likely person. It was this type of irony that Samuel Beckett had demonstrated, most sloganistically with the famous, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”. Rather than having seen such statements as paradoxical, contradictory, or emblematic of the modern condition, a kind of ironic rope trick that involved tying ourselves in knots, we could, alternatively, have seen it as an ironic statement: the inability, and the ability, to go on, both being true, or meaningful. Now for our prideful and prejudiced poem-that-wasn’t-really-a-poem. While I had thought that this wasn’t a pointless exercise, I also had a voice inside me wondering why I hadn’t looked at an actual poem, that a poet sweated tears to write, just joking, because I didn’t find writing poems painful but fun. To reiterate, I was not suggesting the close reading of a whole novel, rather, I was offering an example of a key text in both Pride and Prejudice (first sentences could be interesting keys to novels, generally), and in the pedagogy of irony. Hopefully we could learn something about poetry as well – and the distinction between it and prose fiction. Firstly, we were going to have to break the lines, because while we could have treated it as poetic prose, I thought that it had been necessary to shake it out of its set form, so that it, and we, both got a bit of a formal shock. If we counted the words, we found that there were twenty-three, a prime number, and, therefore, not suggestive of any way to of breaking it into equal numbers of words. 

It is a truth universally 
acknowledged, that a sin-
gle man in possession of 
a good fortune, must be 
in want of a wife.

Not being a free verse poet, and not having had the liberty (timewise), to workshop this with all or any of you, or to have asked you to come up with your own versions, I had settled on a five-line version, using a rule of 4cm per line, roughly. We could hear now, a different rhythm, in fact it barely had any rhythm before but it did now. The sound of the poem tended to submerge the semantic, is how it had seemed to me. In prose, too, it had the feeling of a pronouncement, of being an epigram, but it seemed to me, that feeling had become somewhat depleted. In a sense we had ironised the semantic, as much as reworked its form. If we thought of this as a note in a notebook, with a small page, or as a sign in a shop window, or as a line from an ad, then we could imagine that wasn’t a poem, in a different way. In that way, we would also have ironised poetic form, because it would and would not be, an example of poetic form. It would not be a stanza, not really. Yet someone might have conceivably called it a poem, if they couldn’t accept that the form was prosaic. Something had happened to the voice, too, it had lost its narrational authority for one thing, even if we had thought that that authority was one of irony. To get that, what we might have called, the mock-authoritative tone going, it needed the breadth of the page, and the sense of being a sentence that was wider than a page, that now is curtailed, and this shop window version emphasised a new awkwardness, regarding those two multisyllabic words ‘universally acknowledged’, although they had rolled smoothly enough in prose. The voice which announced, and which would continue with further announcements, presumably, became somewhat vacant, perhaps even silly, in a stanza. Because if the sentiment that was universally acknowledged had been spoken, in this way, it would have seemed ludicrous, and jumpy, possibly even singsong in its tone, as if the text were a detail from an operetta, and not spoken in a middleclass drawing room, say, or the supper room at a ball. An announcement at the top of a prose page merged with what followed. It was not so suited for the emphasis that a lyric stanza provided, with its wide margins, and the white space beneath it. And because I have given it as sequence of short lines, in order for it to be substantial enough to be worth lineating, it looked modern, more modern that the poetry that was contemporary with Austen. Yet it lacked any sort of an image, being so general. It was no ‘Red Wheelbarrow’, to cite William Carlos Williams’s famous, short-lined, imagist poem. It was not one of Emily Dickinson’s shockers (I meant that in a good, avant-garde, way) about death. We seemed to have emptied what was once so full. We had disrespected the man of good fortune, the bourgeois heir, and we had lost interest in what he wanted. We had lost what we might have scrutinised in prose, in our predictable modern way, the heterosexist assumption, that bordered on a form of straight camp. I had started with good intentions, to try and provide you with an introduction to irony, and to show it in a favourable light, as a kind of double tracking, something more theatrical, and interesting, than one person talking. But it seemed that, rather, I had conducted – with your assistance, for a lecture needs an audience to work – a kind of ironic investigation, into irony. Perhaps, however, the next time that you felt an objection rising, to a text that you have heard, or read, you might have considered the possibility that irony was operative, and that there was another meaning available (if not more than one), in addition to the one that you had objected to. Maybe you would be giving the speaker or writer more credit than they deserved, but that was better than giving them less (it made of you a generous reader, for one thing). Rather than end, finally, on this rather protestant note, of making you better people, perhaps I might briefly tell you about my pigeon dream. It was set in various places that I knew well: my parent’s bedroom, the rooms of the farmhouse where I had spent numerous holidays, and the basement of a house, where I had been on retreats. All those rooms existed in various locations in rural New South Wales, but the pigeons were a new species of dream bird that had never existed. They did not coo, either, as far as I remember. 

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