Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

11.1 Verbal irony
Unit 11 Irony
Section 3 Attributing meaning

Verbal irony is a use of language where we do not literally mean what we say; instead we imply an attitude of disbelief towards the content of our utterance or writing. As an example of verbal irony, consider this first sentence of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

To understand how verbal irony works, we need to consider the construction of the meanings that we communicate when we speak or write. A communicated meaning can be analysed into two component parts: (1) a proposition and (2) an attitude towards that proposition. A proposition is a statement about the real world or about some fictional world. The sentences we produce typically encode propositions by containing specific words in a specific order; to be able to speak and understand sentences of a language is to be able to encode and decode a proposition into and from the sentences of that language. However, both our thoughts and hence the meanings we communicate consist of something more than just basic propositions; attached to each proposition is an attitude, usually known as a propositional attitude, which expresses the speaker’s or writer’s relation to that proposition. The most common attitude is belief, but there are other attitudes as well - differing in strength (e.g. basic belief as opposed to strong commitment) as well as in polarity (e.g. belief as opposed to disbelief). If I have an attitude of belief towards a proposition, then that proposition is true for me.

This is relevant for irony, because in irony a speaker or writer produces a proposition that is not true for him or her. In normal (non-ironic) communication, I communicate two things: a proposition and my attitude towards that proposition, which is that I believe the proposition to be true. In verbal irony, I communicate a proposition and a different kind of attitude: that I do not believe the proposition to be true. There is no difference in the proposition itself; the difference is in the attitude that I communicate. Verbal irony is successful when the writer or speaker provides sufficient evidence to indicate that his or her attitude is one of disbelief rather than the expected attitude of belief. In the quoted sentence from Austen, the author actually communicates two propositions, one inside the other, and makes it clear that she believes neither of them. One proposition is ’a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’, and this proposition is contained inside ’It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ The larger proposition, by asserting so strongly the truth of the contained proposition, only serves to indicate the writer’s own disagreement with both of them.

For irony to function as intended, the writer or speaker must be sure that the reader or hearer will be able to recognize that an attitude of disbelief is being communicated; since this is not the normal state of affairs, there must be something odd about the text in order to give clues that the author disbelieves what he or she is saying. Here the oddness of the text is both in the exaggerated claims to certainty made for the proposition and the fact that the proposition itself is not at all clearly true; for it to be universally acknowledged, we too would have already accepted it as true but we do not.

In irony we should generally interpret the speaker/writer to be saying not only that he or she does not believe the proposition but that someone else might believe it to be true. Thus the ironist communicates both his or her own attitude (of disbelief) along with implying a different attitude (of belief) attributed to someone else - whether that someone else is identifiable or not. In the case of this proposition, we can straightforwardly assign this thought to one or more of the characters in the novel (and hence partly understand their actions through this belief). Irony often involves the implication that the speaker or writer shares with us an amused attitude towards the misguided characters who believe the proposition.

We now consider another example of verbal irony from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871) (discussed in MacCabe (1981)):

Some who follow the narrative of his experience may wonder at the midnight darkness of Mr Dagley; but nothing was easier in those times than for an hereditary farmer of his grade to be ignorant, in spite somehow of having a rector in the twin parish who was a gentleman to the backbone, a curate nearer at hand who preached more learnedly than the rector, a landlord who had gone into everything, especially fine art and social improvement, and all the lights of Middlemarch only three miles off. A proposition we can derive from this sentence is ’Given the educated social environment in which he lives, it is surprising that Mr Dagley (the farmer) has remained so ignorant’. We know this to be verbal irony because we know that this proposition is both disbelieved by the writer and attributed to other (misguided, unnamed) people, towards whom the writer has an amused attitude. How do we know that this is irony: that is, that the writer does not hold an attitude of belief towards the proposition? The irony is signalled largely by the exaggerations in the passage: by emphasizing the proposition excessively, the writer warns us that she is not committed to it. There are basically two kinds of exaggeration here: first, expressions of extremity as in ’midnight darkness’, ’nothing was easier’, ’preached more learnedly than the rector’, ’gone into everything’, ’all the lights of Middlemarch’; and, second, a repetitive list, stacking up to produce a long sentence. In addition, we probably also bring our knowledge of the world, and perhaps of the novel as it has previously developed, to contradict the proposition derived.

There are different varieties of verbal irony, though all work in basically the same way, whereby an attitude of disbelief is implicitly communicated. Sarcasm is a kind of verbal irony in which, typically, an exaggerated tone of voice communicates the attitude of disbelief. Note however that, while the tone implies disbelief, this is nevertheless implicit: the speaker does not actually say that they do not believe what they are saying. In irony the attitude of disbelief is always implicitly communicated rather than explicitly communicated. The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice would not be ironic if it was written as ’Some of the characters in this book incorrectly believe that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ Irony thus involves some tension between what is said and what is meant.

(A final comment: note that ’verbal’ means ’using language’ and does not mean the same as ’oral’, which means ’using spoken language’; hence verbal irony exists in both speech and writing.)