Câmpus de São José do Rio Preto Pâmela Rodrigues Scutari Irony and Reader in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis São José do Rio Preto 2020 Pâmela Rodrigues Scutari Irony and Reader in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis Dissertação apresentada como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do título de Mestre em Letras, junto ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras, do Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas da Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”, Câmpus de São José do Rio Preto. Financiadora: CAPES Orientador: Prof. Dr. Peter James Harris São José do Rio Preto 2020 S437i Scutari, Pâmela Rodrigues Irony and Reader in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis / Pâmela Rodrigues Scutari. -- São José do Rio Preto, 2020 120 p. : il. Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas, São José do Rio Preto Orientador: Peter James Harris 1. Literatura britânica. 2. Crítica e interpretação. 3. Cristianismo e literatura. 4. Ironia. 5. Escritores e leitores. I. Título. Sistema de geração automática de fichas catalográficas da Unesp. Biblioteca do Instituto de Biociências Letras e Ciências Exatas, São José do Rio Preto. Dados fornecidos pelo autor(a). Essa ficha não pode ser modificada. Pâmela Rodrigues Scutari Irony and Reader in The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis Dissertação apresentada como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do título de Mestre em Letras, junto ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras, do Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas da Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”, Câmpus de São José do Rio Preto. Financiadora: CAPES Comissão Examinadora Prof. Dr. Peter James Harris UNESP – Câmpus de São José do Rio Preto Orientador Prof. Dr. João Luís Cardoso Tápias Ceccantini UNESP – Câmpus de Assis Prof. Dr. Alvaro Luiz Hattnher UNESP – Câmpus de São José do Rio Preto São José do Rio Preto 13 de julho de 2020 For my mom, whose sense of humour has modelled me as self, and for my dad, who has been benefitted by my jokes. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to God, Who provided all emotional, academic and financial support that I have needed throughout these years, by means of these people and institutions: my parents, Paulo and Emília, who encouraged me to study at UNESP in the first place, and have been supportive throughout my academic journey; my brothers, Daniel and Pedro, who bore my lacking sense of humour when I was unable to be with them; my husband, Allan, who listened to each stream of thought during our long-distance conversations, kept reminding me of the progress of this study, and was understanding when it demanded time; my friends, especially João Pedro and Adriana, who helped this dissertation get to its destination; Dr. Cleide Rapucci, who accepted to supervise, between 2015 and 2016, the first steps of this research during my undergraduate studies; Drs. Peter Schakel, John North, David Clare, Hsiu-Chin Chou, Don Nilsen, Terry Lindvall and Joel Heck, who shared their work and other sources with me; Professors Drs. Orlando Amorim, Marize Dall’Aglio-Hattnher, Claudia Nigro, Giséle Fernandes and Alvaro Hattnher, who made enlightening observations for the development and conclusion of this study; coworkers at elementary school “Governador Mário Covas” in Álvaro de Carvalho, who were welcoming at my new job as an English teacher, and made the continuance of my tasks as a graduate student easier in 2019; São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), which financially supported my undergraduate research in 2016 (process number 2015-21059-9); Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), which financially supported my graduate studies between 2018 and 2019; and my advisor, Professor Dr. Peter James Harris, who agreed to supervise my work, encouraged me to write it in English language, provided all academic support, and inspired the analogy which demonstrates the results of this research. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. “The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.” Umberto Eco RESUMO Este estudo analisa a interação interpretativa entre ironia e leitor na ficção satírica The Screwtape Letters, de C. S. Lewis. Partimos do nível afetivo da ironia presente nas cartas do demônio Screwtape, e utilizamos as noções de cooperação interpretativa e funções da ironia de, respectivamente, Umberto Eco e Linda Hutcheon, para, então, discutir a hipótese de que a inversão irônica que estrutura a obra de Lewis não apenas veicula ideias consideradas importantes, em tempos de guerra, pelo autor, mas também gera seu efeito cômico. Assim, a análise de elementos textuais e contextuais que a constituem e refletem a fé cristã e criatividade ficcional de C. S. Lewis revelam que, uma vez que a inversão irônica é inferida e avaliada pelo leitor a partir de seus movimentos cognitivos e do grau de afetividade em relação às funções irônicas daquela, The Screwtape Letters tem proporcionado uma perspectiva Cristã (por meio de inversão) e fruição literária à comunidade leitora de C. S. Lewis desde sua publicação semanal. Palavras-chave: Interpretação da ironia. Sátira religiosa. Literatura e Cristianismo. Recepção literária. ABSTRACT This study analyses the interpretive interplay between irony and reader in satirical fiction The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. It parts from senior devil Screwtape’s affective level of irony and uses Umberto Eco’s and Linda Hutcheon’s notions of, respectively, interpretive cooperation and functions of irony to discuss the hypothesis that ironic inversion functions as a structured whole in Lewis’s work, in the sense that it not only conveys religious ideas regarded as important in wartime by the author, but also raises its comic effects. Thus, the analysis of textual and contextual elements which constitute it and reflect C. S. Lewis’s Christian faith and fictional creativity will reveal that, once ironic inversion is inferred and evaluated by the reader from his/her cognitive movements and degree of affectivity in relation to its ironical functions, The Screwtape Letters has provided a Christian perspective in reverse as well as literary enjoyability to C. S. Lewis’s community of readers since its weekly publication. Keywords: Interpretation of irony. Religious satire. Literature and Christianity. Reader reception. LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 – Roles and messages from Douglas C. Muecke 21 Figure 2 – The functions of irony from Linda Hutcheon 35 Figure 3 – Satirical victims in The Screwtape Letters 99 Figure 4 – Functions of Irony in The Screwtape Letters 103 SUMMARY 1 INTRODUCTION 11 2 IRONY AND READER 16 2.1 An Introduction to Irony 16 2.2 The Reader of an Ironic Work 28 2.3 Irony and Reader in (Religious) Satire 39 3 C. S. LEWIS, IRONY AND READER 47 3.1 C. S. Lewis: The Critic, the Fictionist, the Apologist 47 3.2 The Screwtape Letters 57 3.2.1 Context, Publication and Reception 58 3.2.2 Devilish Plot, Characterisation and Style 61 3.2.3 Ironic Inversion: From Satire to Apologetics 73 4 IRONY AND READER IN THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS 79 4.2 An Interpretive Walk Through the Letters 79 4.2 Levels of Irony and the Role of the Reader 98 4.3 Functions of Irony: The Reader’s Evaluation 101 5 CONCLUSION 111 REFERENCES 115 11 1 INTRODUCTION This study was born out of my first experience in reading satirical, epistolary fiction The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C. S. Lewis. Undersecretary Screwtape’s advisory letters and arrogant and satirical tone towards an Englishman, religion and his nephew, the junior tempter Wormwood, have motivated this study in these senses: since Screwtape is a devil, how is he able to make the reader laugh in spite of his uttering of truths about the essence of humankind and religion in his satirising the Patient, and have him/her optionally regard those as corrective?; and, once the reader has realised the contradiction in Screwtape’s letters, how can the senior devil be self- deprecated by scorn which does not seem to have himself as a target? Critics have argued that reading experiences which may allow questions such as these are only possible through interpreting the ironic inversion which underpins C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Since it requires a double interpretation of the senior devil Screwtape’s ironical utterances for religious and contextual purposes, a double- edged irony can then be elicited, to the extent that there may be multiple interpretations – from disguise to comedy or morality – and multiple targets of those utterances (Schakel, “The Satiric Imagination of C. S. Lewis”; Chou, “The Devil in Disciplines”).1 As the act of reading and interpreting irony in the Letters cannot be one-sided – from the ironist’s point of view only –, the present study focuses on the irony of the work, which enables us to raise these and other questions, as well as on the reader’s walk as an interpreter and his/her level of empathy towards the double-edged irony applied to the Letters – which can also take him/her as a target. The study is therefore divided into three chapters: my theoretical discussion, “Irony and Reader”; an introduction and contextualisation, “C. S. Lewis, Irony and Reader”; and, finally, my analysis, “Irony and Reader in The Screwtape Letters”. Chapter two, “Irony and Reader”, begins with an “Introduction to Irony”. The Greek root of irony early characterises eironeia as a mode of behaviour or figure of speech, which is to say, dissimulation, and praising to blame or blaming to praise, respectively; while the Latin ironia, in its turn, was used as a rhetorical figure by Roman writer Cicero and a strategy by Quintilian.