The Concept of Irony: Jane Austen's Emma and Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater

Abstract

Jane Austen and Philip Roth share an unexpected and ironic attachment. Unexpected not just because if Austen epitomizes feminine propriety and taste, then Roth represents nadir of misogynistic carnality but also because this similarity is best felt in works that most define this difference: Emma (1816) and Sabbath's Theater (1995). This is not to claim that these texts invite historical comparison or to raise question of influence; rather, what provokes inquiry is way that each of these authors faces down and even overmatches his or her own age. Their shared weapon is irony, and it is from perspective of this concept that two authors can be read together.These two works by Austen and Roth suggest a type of irony exemplified in romanticism's earliest and carried into nineteenth century, where absence, division, and fragmentation are completed by their readers' own mistaken ideas. To take romanticism and irony separately, it should be made clear at outset that this is not kind of definition of romanticism that allowed A. C. Bradley to find Austen anomalous to her own age, age of revival. In Bradley's lecture on Austen, romanticism is centrally concerned with new modes of feeling towards [...] human in its most simple, primitive, or unsocial forms or the idea that civilization is fall of man from some paradisal state of nature (362). However, definition of romanticism that connects Roth and Austen extends constellation of ideas that has arisen in modern literary theory from Maurice Blanchot's essay Athenaeum and its development by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Together they place at heart of romanticism romantic fragment, exemplified by unfinished artwork. Here, romantic authors use our expectations to deceive us because their texts are completed only by expectations of reader, a use of expectation that reveals, through negation, reader's false ideas and ideals. This theory allows such a fragmentation of expectation to emerge strikingly through Roth's and Austen's analyses of impossibility of specific gender roles that are enacted by their protagonists-Roth's lecherous Nietzschean puppeteer Mickey Sabbath and Austens handsome, clever lady of substance Emma Woodhouse-as they engage with their supporting characters and their readers. Both authors skillfully utilize romantic or fragmentary to disabuse us of our ideas regarding gender-not merely our stereotypes, but also very meaning that is developed from an epistemology based on this division. Another word for this fragmentary negation is irony.The concept of irony at play here is not drawn from any of its three most common avatars: mere curiosity of a coincidence, dissimulation of saying one thing while meaning another, and invention of elite shibboleths allowing membership in a particular clique. All of these are not irony in fragmentary sense used here because they are meant to be understood. Coincidence explains away chaos; dissimulation is purposive and its goal discloses it; and while elite shibboleths may exclude many from understanding, they also are designed to include and to unite against excluded. Contrary to these forms, there are four definitions of irony, necessarily abstract at this point, that lead toward an understanding of Roth's and Austen's use of it. The first two are from early theorist of romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel; third and fourth are from Soren Kierkegaard, a stern critic of former. For Schlegel, irony always emerges as paradox:[In irony,] everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden. [. . .] It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between absolute and relative, between impossibility and necessity of complete communication. [. . . Thus irony is] an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts. …