The Text Estranged: Topographies of Irony in Chaucer and Milton

Abstract

Linda Hutcheon begins her study 'Irony's Edge' by explaining that "What this book tries to do ... is to figure out how and why irony comes about (or doesn't)". She asks an interesting question: "why should anyone want to use this strange mode of discourse where you say something you don't actually mean and expect people to understand not only what you do actually mean but also your attitude towards it?" (Hutcheon, 2) Yet it may be that irony is not a "strange mode of discourse" at all but a normal and even endemic feature of all discourse. "Verbal irony" occurs as a familiar phenomenon not only in Plato's Socrates but in everyday behaviour: we all know speakers (and may be such individuals ourselves) who characteristically communicate ironically - and although we may be perfectly convinced of our ability to recognize our own irony, we may be equally convinced, as teachers or scholars. that what we recognize is not something that really exists at all except in our own claim that it does, validated - if we are fortunately understood - by the appropriate decryptions of our listeners. From the word's first appearance in Aristophanes and Plato to its analysis by the most recent commentators, 'eironeia' has demonstrated its stubborn presence as a 'characteristic' feature of human speech and writing: just as the Greek word for an actor is "hypocrite", a dissembler, so the verb "to speak, say or tell" is 'eiro' and an 'eiron' or speaker, a dissembler, as though in some profound way speech acts themselves are essentially dissembling or ironical. Questions of ethics and of value thus inevitably attach themselves to ironical statement or rhetoric. Dissimulation, deceit, pretty fictions, cunning duplicity, derisive teasing, taunting sneers, strategic understatement, or outright lies - or, conversely, unspoken or unspeakable truths - are thought of as being imparted by ironic rhetoric, and even intrinsic to language itself.