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

11.4 Uncertain ironies
Unit 11 Irony
Section 3 Attributing meaning

Irony is sometimes clear, but sometimes we feel that a writer or speaker is communicating propositions that we think they are unlikely to believe, but we do not have clear evidence either to think that they are being ironic or that they are lying. Problems in identifying or interpreting irony can arise when author and reader are separated by major differences in what they know - if, for example, they are separated by major differences in time or place or culture. Because one of the ways of marking irony is for the text to contradict what we already know, the identification of irony can depend on our (culturally dependent) knowledge. In some cases, the fact that cultural or subcultural differences can be a barrier to irony can be exploited by an author. Dick Hebdige once proposed that the new wave song ’Heart of Glass’ by Blondie is capable of being read ironically (given a certain subcultural ’punk’ awareness) or non-ironically (in mainstream culture), thus maximizing its audience. Perhaps the barriers to cross-cultural interpretation of irony explain the claim that is sometimes made that people in a certain foreign culture ’lack the capacity for irony’, because irony is difficult to recognize across cultures given its dependence on culturally dependent knowledge. Nevertheless, given that irony is an exploitation of some very basic characteristics of human communication, irony should be possible in every language and every culture, even if outsiders have difficulty in identifying or interpreting it.

The difficulties just mentioned are the consequence - often accidental - of cultural difference. But difficulties in the identification or interpretation of irony can also be built into the workings of a text. Thus it is possible to find texts that are apparently ironic (e.g. what is said contradicts what we know), where there is a narrator, but where it is difficult to judge whether the narrator is the victim of a structural irony (i.e. a naive narrator, unaware of the ironies) or whether instead the narrator is to be understood as producing verbal irony (and hence is aware of the irony); Samuel Beckett’s fiction and plays often present a problem of this kind. Similarly, texts might have overt ironies where there are two opposing voices within them, each taking different attitudes towards a proposition, but where it is difficult to decide which of the two voices is the voice of truth. These problems are characteristically found in modernist texts, where there may be many competing voices.

As an illustration of some of the more complex possibilities of irony, consider part of Shelley’s poem ’Ozymandias’ (1819). This is a poem that - we assume deliberately - generates a number of unresolvable interpretive problems, among which is the identification and attribution of the irony in the inscription cited in lines 10-11:

9 And on the pedestal these words appear:

10 ’My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

11 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

The inscription is found on a pedestal, surrounded by fragments of a statue and otherwise ’nothing besides remains’ in the desert where it stands. If the inscription is to be interpreted as ’Despair because even my great works will come to nothing’ then it is not ironic at all; it is correctly believed by all parties concerned. If alternatively the inscription is to be interpreted as ’Despair because my works are so great’ then this proposition is falsely believed by Ozymandias, and correctly disbelieved by us (because the works have now vanished over the course of time). However, even if we identify the text as ironic, there is still a problem of attribution, because it is not clear what attitude is taken by the sculptor - the person who has written these words on the statute: did the sculptor believe or disbelieve the proposition ’Despair because my works are so great’? It is not clear that these questions can be answered: whether there is an irony, and how exactly the attitudes are to be attributed. These uncertainties are characteristic of Shelley’s work in general, and in particular of this poem, which is rich in uncertainties.