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

Activity 11.1
Unit 11 Irony
Section 3 Attributing meaning

This is the beginning of H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) (note the date):

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.

1 Explain why we might say that Wells develops ’situational irony’ in this passage.

2 Are there examples also of verbal irony? If so, does the verbal irony interact with the situational irony?

3 What evidence does Wells offer the reader that the text is ironic.

4 Who is being ’Othered’ in this passage.

5 What purposes might the irony serve? If you know anything about science fiction more generally, discuss some of the ways in which Wells’s use of irony is here typical of the genre.

Reading

Fabb, N. (1997) Linguistics and Literature, Oxford: Blackwell, Chapter 10.

Furniss, T.E. and Bath, M. (1996) Reading Poetry, London: Longman, Chapter 8.

Leech, G. and Short, M. (1981) Style in Fiction, London: Longman, pp. 277-80.

MacCabe, C. (1979) James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, London: Macmillan.

Muecke, D.C. (1970) Irony and the Ironic, London: Methuen.

Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Blackwell, Chapter 4.