Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony

Abstract

Reviewed by: Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony Jenifer Reksovna Karyshyn Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and New York: Routledge: 1995. 248 pages. Citing Umberto Eco’s admonition that “‘Irony must not be commented upon’; its identifying rhetorical nature lies in its indirection,” Linda [End Page 971] Hutcheon makes her own irony “happen,” and shows what distinguishes her extended commentary on the subject, Irony’s Edge, from previous attempts to isolate this “slippery” form of discourse. Countering the conventional characterization of irony as an élite practice which winnows the competent from the slow, and which eludes description, Hutcheon’s theory of irony privileges the interpreter’s perspective rather than the ironist’s intentions. With analyses of her own encounters with irony’s edge at the cinema, at the opera hall, and in museums, Hutcheon attempts to lay bare the operations of irony inductively, and to offer a theory of irony that empowers the individual. According to Hutcheon, irony does not “exist.” Instead, it is a kinetic—indeed, almost ephemeral—event that can “happen” between speaker and auditor, or between curator and museum visitor; and “the final responsibility for deciding whether irony actually happens in an utterance or not (and what that ironic meaning is) rests, in the end, solely with the interpreter” (45), rather than with the initiating ironist. The political force of this shift from a receptive recognition to a kinetic “happening,” as the author herself admits, is to dislodge the commonplace that those who don’t “get” particular ironies lack the cognitive skills the rest of us enjoy. “Interpretive competence” is a term often used in speech act theory; Hutcheon sets out to banish it—with its ironist-centric perspective—from the lexicon of irony, in favor of the more egalitarian concept of felicitously overlapping (or not) “communities”: the cultural competence that interpreters are said to need might be more a matter of overlapping discursive communities between both participants. In a sense, then, it would be less a matter of the competence of one than of what Dan Sperber and Diedre Wilson have called the relevance of the context to both. (96; emphasis in original) Hutcheon’s theory of the role these “communities” play in ironic interpretation becomes somewhat inconsistent with her attempt to privilege the interpreter as individual. Reversing the critical convention that irony cordons off exclusive communities within the larger group of auditors-at-large, Hutcheon claims that members of pre-existing communities make (or don’t make) irony “happen” with other members of pre-existing communities. Such a claim exonerates irony per se from charges of discrimination, and isolates irony from exclusive connection to any particular political force: irony is not merely a machine with which conservatives maintain the status quo, nor a necessarily dissociated comment on the foibles of an inferior society; not merely a subversive means for minorities to find a voice, nor a badge of those minorities’ complicity with the larger powers. Hutcheon’s emphasis on our ever-shifting membership in a variety of discursive “communities” has another implication as well; as she portrays an individual’s personal membership portfolio as something, because of its almost ontic quality, immune to criticism or judgment. [End Page 972] Hutcheon might seem to shift an individual’s interpretative responsibilities onto the groups to which he belongs, but the imprimatur of her form of identity politics is its liberty, malleability, and overall lack of obligation. Even as each individual boasts a variety of group memberships, his membership in a particular group will not assure his interpretation of irony. That is, one can trace an individual’s skills back to his communities, but an individual’s communities do not bind him to certain forms of understanding. This lack of obligation on which to depend makes futile—and dangerous —an ironist’s attempt to anticipate his audience’s reaction. The interpreter might determine that he should “make irony happen” by noting the “circumstantial, textual, and intertextual environment of the passage in question” (143); but, as Hutcheon recognizes, there is no “fail-safe” marker that distinguishes context from text, frame from material. Such an ambiguity of ironic indices led...