Muecke - Irony and the Ironic

To
Barbara Wall
fellow student

The change of title is designed solely to mark the fact that, with the exceptions of the section entitled Early concepts of irony and a few paragraphs here and there, the present work constitutes less a revision of my earlier work in this series than a complete rewriting.

D. C. M.

The author would like to thank Professor Leslie Bodi of Monash University for what has been more than twenty years of friendly and helpful ironological consociation.

The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Martin Esslin and Encounter for The Solution (Bertolt Brecht, trans. Martin Esslin, June 1959).

When all else fails, read the directions. These words, printed on a can of paint, show that irony plays a part in everyday living, a relatively small part, perhaps, though many other instances could be cited. Such folk irony generally offers no great challenge; something more sly or covert like The directions may be ignored might only have proved puzzling, though the message is much the same. In this work, more attention will be paid to irony in literature than to the simpler ironies practised or observed in life at large. Not that a sociological approach to irony need be uninteresting: one would like to know what parts both Verbal Irony and the shared recognition of ironical situations and happenings play in the daily life of different social groupings, and whether people are more likely or less likely to be ironical, more alert or less alert to irony, according to social class and status, degree of urbanization, strength of religious or political convictions, occupation, sex, education, IQ rating or personality type. The hero of Svevos Confessions of Zeno remarks that Accountants are by nature a race of animals much inclined to irony. Since, however, Svevo, not to mention his hero, had had a career in commerce, the statement if true may be ironical but if ironical may be true.

I had long been hearing, in the English colony at Tokyo, that no Japanese can understand irony (whereas the Chinese, of course, use it all the time). So William Empson, who taught in both Japanese and Chinese universities in the 1930s (New York Review of Books, 12 June 1975, p. 37). On the other hand, a desultory reading in anthologies of Chinese and Japanese classics (admittedly in English translations) might easily give a contrary impression: that the Chinese are straightforward and practical with a robust sense of humour, that the Japanese are involuted, introspective and sophisticated. The way in which the