The Boarding House'

The Literary Semiotics of Verbal Irony: The Example of Joyce's 'The Boarding House' LINDA HUTCHEON McMaster University SHARON A. BUTLER Goldsmiths' College In classical rhetoric, irony figured, along with metaphor, metonymy and syneedoche, as one of the four principal tropes. However, the historical fate of irony in English literary criticism since then has been a bizarre one. In English (and also German) speaking nations in particular, its primary dictionary meaning (a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used) became transferred to that figurative sense in which one speaks of cosmic irony, the irony of fate - in other words, to an attitude of the modern mind as it interprets man's role in the universe. Irony then became the domain of the philosopher (Kierkegaard), the psychoanalyst (Freud's studies on jokes), or the ideologue for, like parody, irony can be seen as an 'elitist' form of literature. Lately, however, things have been changing. In the last ten years there have been a number of extended attempts to reconcile irony as a formal mode of literary discourse with irony as a world view: witness Wayne Booth's 1974 The Rhetoric of Irony, following D. Muecke's The Compass of Irony (1969). As recently as December 1980 the Modern Language Association of America devoted a session of its convention to the function of literary irony, signaling perhaps a reappropriation of the trope by modern English criticism. In semiotics too, the revaluation of irony has begun. There have been special issues on this topic of both Poetique (No. 36) and Linguistique et simiologie (No. 2), and a five day colloquium on 'Ironic Discourse' was held at the International Centre for Semiotics and Linguistics at Urbino, Italy in 1979. At this conference many of the papers - in all fields - attempted to posit definitions of irony in terms of the intersection of an ethos (mocking) and a formal structure (antiphrasis). Other recent general semiotic studies of irony have been explicitly oriented towards linguistic (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1980) or pragmatic (Hutcheon, 1981) analyses. In literary semiotics in particular, however, very little new work in this area has appeared. And the studies of irony in literary discourse that do exist reveal a striking and curious consistency in the examples of irony that are cited. Shakespeare's famous line from Julius Caesar, 'And Brutus is an honourable man,' has a privileged status, as has the opening sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (see Allemann, 1978: as/sz Vol1 (1981), 3 245 Verbal Irony 390 and Almansi, 1978: 415). What one also notices, however, is that in each case the urut of analysis is that of a single sentence. There is an obvious reason for this and that is, quite simply, the traditional definition of irony as an oppositional or antiphrastic semantic phenomenon. One can be relatively convincing in showing that single sentences or words can mean the opposite of what they say. However, it is considerably more difficult to extend such analytic methods to the level of discourse. In fact, the paucity of attempts to do so - especially in English criticism - testifies to this difficulty. It also, of course, acts as a challenge to literary semiotics. Any attempt to study the extended textual identity of irony is, by its very nature, restricted - in the sense that it must begin from particular texts and only then proceed to general semiotic principles. James Joyce's Dubliners stories provide an appropriate data base, for although they are conventionally described as ironic (for example, by Levin, 1961: 41; Beck, 1969: 25, 27), there has been little attempt and even less success in textually localizing that irony. It would appear that in these stories it is hard to point to any one signifier that has a double signified. Such an antiphrastic semantic view of irony is bound to present problems in the analysis of textual segments larger than the word or, for that matter, the sentence. For instance, Booth's (1974: 10) first step in reconstructing irony - the rejection by the reader of the literal meaning - presents an obvious dilemma to the critic dealing with a longer text, such as Joyce's, which would in effect disintegrate, were the literal meaning actually rejected. Joyce is not yet that radical. In focusing on one of the stories for purposes of analysis - 'The Boarding House' - one notices that, contrary to Booth's view, there are in fact very few incongruities, few actual stylistic or contextual conflicts to signal to the reader the need to reconstruct a new meaning. This oppositional definition of irony as, in Muecke's (1969: 15) terms, a 'double-layered or two-storey phenomenon,' fails to account for the impression of a more multi-directional and almost polyphonic kind of irony in Joyce's text. Also, the etymological meaning of irony points towards a discrepancy in awareness that has often functioned as its definitive feature, as it so obviously does in so-called dramatic irony. Indeed, the dupe traditional to much ironic literature, the unaware innocent who lacks the knowledge crucial to preventing his victimization, might at first glance seem the key to the nature of the irony in Joyce's tale of Bob Doran's entrapment into marriage. Yet Bob Doran 'had a notion that he was being had' and Joyce makes it clear that all of his characters are well aware of what is going on. Of interest, then, from a semiotic perspective, is the fact that Joyce's primary mode of irony here is verbal and not situational, despite first impressions. Yet, and here lies the problem, it does not operate either antiphrastically or merely on the level of the single sentence as semantic unit. Both the narrow oppositional meaning of irony and the scope of its textual localization are called into question by a text such as 'The Boarding House.' It is clear to the reader that the author's satiric evaluation is closely 246 Recherches Semiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry linked to the overall ironic effect of the text. But it is not really a case of what Beda Allemann (1978: 393) has called a basic ironic tonality evoked from the first page and which is easy to recognize. It is, in fact, not easy to recognize, or at least not easy to pinpoint textually, especially within the confines of a purely antiphrastic concept of irony. For, as rhetoric taught, irony is not just a semantic opposition; it also involves a pragmatic ethos which implies a mocking attitude of the encoding author towards his text. Irony is a strategy as well as a structure. There is little disagreement among semioticians that irony does involve, for the reader, a going beyond the text, to a decoding of the ironic evaluative intent of the encoder. However, it is also obvious that there must be signals within the text for the reader to begin this process. Yet theorists as diverse as Allemann (1978: 393) and Orecchioni (1977: 139) agree that the degree of ironic effect in a literary text is inversely proportionate to the number of overt signals needed to achieve that effect. This seemingly desirable lack of ironic signals in the text obviously suggests certain problems for semiotic analyses of literary irony. However, one important attempt to liberate irony from the straight-jacket of an oppositional semantic definition is that made by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their article, 'Les ironies comme mentions' (1978). The 'mention' of the title is opposed, as in philosophical logic, to 'emploi': when one uses an expression, one designates what that expression designates. On the other hand, when one mentions an expression, one designates that expression itself. This idea of 'mention' seems particularly relevant to irony of Joyce's type, since his irony too adds little to the overt message, in informational terms, but does point to an attitude - a negative evaluative attitude - of the encoding author. As a self-reflexive modality, the irony of Joyce's textual repetitions echo back on themselves intratextually with judgemental impact. This would seem to be in agreement with Sperber and Wilson's idea that most ironies can be described as 'mentions (généralement implicites) de proposition; ces mentions sont interprétées comme l'écho d'un 6noncé ou d'une pensée dont le locuteur entend souligner le manque de justesse ou de pertinence' (1978: 409). In terms of speech act theory, the lack of truth and pertinence value in most ironic utterances flouts Grice's (1975) Cooperative Principle - of Quality and Relation. In conversation one usually copes easily with the shifts introduced by this ironic flouting. In Grician terms, this comes about through what is called 'implicature,' those assumptions needed to keep the Cooperative Principle in force. These implicata are not a necessary part of understanding the conventional meaning of the utterance. They are optional and additional factors but they do rely on culturally-shared knowledge of conventions and expectations. If literature is considered a speech context, albeit of a special kind,' one can see how an ironic text provides a paradigm of this situation for, in such a work, what is 'implicated' is indeed distinguishable from what is stated. In other words, the text's meaning consists of both what is written and what is 'implicated.' Two consequences follow: first, what is 'implicated' need not be reduced to a simple antiphrastic identity in relation to what is stated. In fact, polysemantic possibilities present themselves. Second, however much one might wish to point to textual indices 247 Verbal Irony of ironic meaning in a text, one cannot restrict 'what is written' to lexical items in the text.

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