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Recognizing Irony or How Not to be Duped When Reading

Contributed by Faye Halpern
Department of English

The Four Steps of Reconstruction
(taken from Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Irony)

  1. You reject the literal meaning--not because you disagree but because you will be unable to escape recognizing some incongruity among the words or between the words and something else you know.
  2. You try out alternative interpretations that are incongruous with the literal statement. You doubt yourself. You wonder if the author has made a slip, is crazy, if that word must mean something you don't know about.
  3. You then decide about the author's knowledge or beliefs. If you decide the author couldn't have possibly meant it and means you to concur in the rejection, then you are halfway there.
  4. You choose a new meaning. "In contrast with the statement that the author pretends to be making, which implies beliefs that she cannot have held, she is really saying such-and-such, which is in harmony with what I know or can infer about her beliefs or intentions."

Clues to Irony:

  1. Straightforward warnings in the author's voice.
    • they can appear in titles, ex. Ring Lardner's "Gullible's Travels," William de Morgan's Joseph Vance: An Ill-Written Autobiography
    • they can appear in epigraphs (quotations that precede the book or chapter), when an author quotes from known ironists or uses a quotation that contradicts the claims of the characters.
  2. Known error proclaimed.
    • through mangling of clichés: "You could have heard a bomb drop"
    • through contradicting historical fact: talking about a war that never happened, attributing a book to the wrong author.
    • going against conventional judgment. No author could reasonably say that about that subject.
  3. Conflicts of fact within the work.
  4. Dramatic Irony.
    • happens whenever an author deliberately asks us to compare what two or more characters say of each other, or what a character says now with what he says or does later. Any plain discrepancy will do.

Some Ironic Examples:

"When all was over and the rival kings were celebrating their victory with Te Deums in their respective camps..."
--Voltaire

"Now lap-dogs give themselves the rousing shake,
And sleepless lovers, just at twelve, awake."
--Alexander Pope

Dear Susan Sontag, Would you please read my books and make me famous?
--Kathy Acker

"While the Victorian architects were busy erecting tasteful reproductions of Chartres Cathedral and the belfry of Bruges (so useful for factory chimneys) and covering the rather inefficiently drained marshes on the outskirts of Westminster with the stucco palaces of the nobility and gentry, it must not be imagined that the needs of the humbler classes of the community were in any way overlooked. In all the great new towns of the Midlands and the Industrial North large housing estates sprang up on which, by the exercise of remarkable forethought and ingenuity, so great was the anxiety lest the worker should be too far removed from the sights and sounds of the factory or mine which was the scene of his cheerful labour, a quite fantastic number of working families were accommodated. In order that the inhabitants might have the privilege of contemplating, almost ceaselessly, the visible tokens of nineteenth-century man's final triumph over nature, many of these estates were carefully built alongside the permanent way, or even, if there was a viaduct handy, actually underneath it."
--Osbert Lancaster, writing about developments made during the Industrial Revolution.

"The very boldness of the plan has disturbed some people. In American business, unfortunately, there are still many personnel men who have a laissez-faire attitude toward human relations, who argue that there is a large part of the employee's life and personality that is not of concern to the corporation...As a result of this surveillance, and such encouragements as probationary fellowships, we would ensure a constantly replenishing reservoir of potential cardholders...At the same time we were bringing newcomers in we would be pruning the current membership. There would be nothing static about the system, and if a man fell beneath an acceptable rating, we would revoke his card. This would be hard on the people concerned, but they would be the lone-persons, the mystics, the intellectual agitators--which is to say, the kind of people that the modern organization doesn't really want anyway."
--"The Case for the Universal Card," Otis Stanford Binet (pseudonym for Wm. H. Whyte, Jr.), publ. in Fortune Magazine.