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

11.2 Situational irony
Unit 11 Irony
Section 3 Attributing meaning

Situational irony involves a conflict between what two different people (or two groups of people) know. The participant in events understands them in a way that is not correct, while the viewer or audience to the events understands them differently but correctly, such that their understanding conflicts with the participant’s understanding. The viewer or audience is able to do this because they have an advantage over the participant, usually by virtue of being outside the situation of the participant. The participant is ’subject to situational irony’, where ’situational irony’ can be understood as a way of an audience describing events relative to a participant. An understanding of the kinds of situational irony is largely a recognition of the different ways of being ’outside the situation of the participant’. This is rather different from verbal irony, but we will see at the end of this section that there are some connections.

The participant can be a child, or some other individual who is developmentally or inherently unable to fully understand their situation, while the audience is developmentally more advanced than the participant - an older child, or an adult, for example. An example is Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897). The child Maisie reports events in the adult world without fully understanding them, but we as adults can reintepret her descriptions in the light of our adult understanding of kinds of event; thus we recognize Maisie as ’subject to situational irony’. Situational irony can also separate a child character from a child reader; many children’s books expect their readers to recognize that the child character is unable to understand their own situation, and that this understanding relates to their limits as children; the ten-year-old readers of Jacqueline Wilson’s The Suitcase Kid (1992) are expected to understand more about the ten-year-old character Andrea’s situation than she herself can understand; and part of this understanding is that the child reader is - like all readers - always outside the situation of the characters in the book. Thus a reader may be able to overcome the developmental limits associated with a child of their own age, by virtue of the superior position of being a reader. Even very young children’s books encourage this: Beatrix Potter’s illustrations to The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) encourage the child to identify to some extent with the animal characters (by putting the child looking at the picture at an eye-height just above that of the rabbits), and to see the rabbits as like the children themselves, while also enabling them to see the rabbits from the outside, permitting the assignment of situational irony. Another kind of ’limited’ participant might include someone with a cognitive impairment that prevents them fully understanding their situation; this might include the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) or the cognitively impaired narrator of book 1 of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). Finally, the participant might be non-human, and so unable to understand their situation (in comparison with us, as humans); they might be an alien, or an animal.

These ways of separating the reader from the participant are all ways of Othering the participant: that is, defining the participant not just as different but also as less than us. But these Othered participants can also encourage us to read the situational ironies in reverse, so that we identify with the character in the book as having a special kind of knowledge that we as readers lack; it is as though we temporarily depart from our own culturally contextualized selves to inhabit the fictional characters and then look back at ourselves and thereby subject ourselves to situational irony. Thus a child or animal in a book may by their difference be able to understand our adult human situation in ways that we ourselves cannot understand; now we are caught inside the situational irony and presented as such by the characters in the book. The Harry Potter books work in this way, encouraging the child reader to identify with the Othered ’wizards’ and to look back at humans as limited and unable to understand the complexities of the world we live in. Similarly, in many novels a ’foreigner’ comes to our society and, because of their impaired familiarity with it (which in some ways subjects them to situational irony), they describe our society in ways that show that we also do not fully understand our situation, thus subjecting us to situational irony; an example of this would be George Mikes’s How To Be an Alien(1946), an Othering description of British society in the 1950s written for a British audience from the perspective of a Hungarian immigrant.

Another way of being outside the situation of a participant is to be historically later than the participant. The historical irony here arises because the participant’s understanding of what events mean is contrary to a later, better and fuller understanding of them. Similarly, a participant may have convictions about how events will play out in (their) future, but from our later perspective we know that they will play out very differently.

Dramatic irony can be understood as a sub-kind of situational irony, most prototypically found in the theatre. A character on stage and involved in a dramatic action has a specific belief that the audience knows to be false. Typically, that incorrect belief will be about some crucial component of the plot, and hence the dramatic irony functions as a narrative mechanism:

Pedro:

Sure I had dwelt forever on her bosom -

But stay, he’s here.

[Enter Belvile dressed in Antonio’s clothes.]

Florinda (aside):

’Tis not Belvile; half my fears are vanished.

In this extract from Aphra Behn’s play The Rover (1677), Florinda has a belief about an event that is incorrect; the audience, from their vantage point ’outside the situation’ of the stage knows that in fact Belville has entered the stage. A writer may use the physical arrangement of the stage - with sightlines accessible to the audience but not to the characters - to distinguish the situations of the characters and the audience and hence to create dramatic irony.

All these examples of situational irony have in common that the irony is created by a difference in situation and knowledge between the participants in events on the one hand and the audience to those events (us) on the other hand. The irony is not created by a person as such, but can be attributed to the events themselves as they occur. (Of course the events themselves might have been created by a playwright or novelist, but this is ignored in thinking of these ironies as having no human ’causer’.) Instead of being attributed to a person, situational irony can be attributed to notions such as fate (in French it is called ’ironie du sort’ - irony of fate), or time, or history, or life (as in ’life’s little ironies’), or circumstances, or indeed anything: the first quote in the OED for this meaning of irony refers to ’the irony of war’ (that it is better to fire an arrow at the horse than at the rider).