Irony

Irony is a tricky thing. And it serves some arguments better than others: it's not an accident that Austen was a genius with irony while Wollstonecraft was a clumsy ironist.

The photo below is of an Occupy protestor. The thing is, is the irony intended? That part is you're call. But, no matter what his intention is (that is whether he said the stupid thing knowingly or without realizing it was stupid), the thing blows up in his face. It's very hard to make irony work for a radical cause.

Irony (3)

A friend's father used to say to her, "Don't teach your father to suck eggs." He used the expression whenever he thought she was being condescending.

The thing is, I think it is very important to teach ourselves how to suck eggs. We have to go back and look at things that might seem too basic and obvious to analyze and analyze them. For example, we should be careful to note that the opening sentence of Northanger Abbey reads like this:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.

And not like this:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland would suppose her to be an heroine.

Here are the egg-sucking points I think follow from that:

• Even if we take this as being ironic it does not follow that Catherine is an heroine, only that she was born to be one.
• Her infancy—that is where she was born and how she was brought up—is the thing that Austen thinks really matters.
• It would follow that every girl with an infancy similar to Catherine's is born to be an heroine.

Further complicating the whole thing is whether Austen is being realistically ironic or "novelistically" ironic; that is, does she mean simply that Catherine Morland has the makings of an heroine even though she doesn't seem the part or does she mean she doesn't seem like a likely heroine for a novel and I'm only sticking her in one to make a burlesque of it?

Irony (2)

If I say, "I can never have too much strawberry ice cream," I can mean that just about any amount of strawberry ice cream is too much. I said one thing and meant the opposite. In a sense, all irony is like this. With irony, you can't say X and mean something ever so slightly different. You can only say "X" and mean "not X".

Irony (1)

I'm going to blog my way through Sense and Sensibility. Before doing so, I want to go back and remind myself of a few things. I am going to have to remind myself about Northanger Abbey for starters.

Here is the first sentence:

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.

And here we all sigh appreciatively and think, "Irony, irony is there anything as lovely as Austen's irony". And we say that because we appreciate that Austen's actual meaning here is subtle and complex. We need to remind ourselves that that is quite a trick on her part because irony isn't complex or subtle. Irony is about as subtle as a getting hit in the face with a kipper*.

In Austen it is never the kipper itself that is subtle because a kipper can't be subtle. What is subtle is the way Austen wields her kipper.




* This is a tribute to my mother who once let a boy know she didn't appreciate his approach by hitting him in te afce with a kipper.