(Adapted from Perrine’s Structure, Sound & Sense) Section 7: Humor and Irony Novels and short stories that employ humor often use the technique we call irony, a term which has a range of meanings that all involve some sort of discrepancy or incongruity. Irony should not be equated with mere sarcasm (from the Greek sarcasmus – “flesh-­‐tearing), which is simply language one person uses to belittle or ridicule another. Irony is far more complex, a technique used to convey a truth about human experience by exposing some incongruity of a character’s behavior or a society’s traditions. Operating through careful, often subtle indirection, irony helps to critique the world in which we live by laughing at the many varieties of human eccentricity and folly. It may be useful here to distinguish three distinct kinds of irony found in literary fiction: 1. Verbal irony, usually the simplest kind, is a figure of speech in which the speaker says the opposite of what he or she intends to say. (This form of irony is, in fact, often employed to create sarcasm.) In “Hunters in the Snow,” when Kenny says to Tub, “You’re just wasting away before my very eyes,” he is speaking ironically – and sarcastically – for of course Tub is obese, and Kenny intends to hurt him. 2. In dramatic irony the contrast is between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true. The value of this kind of irony lies in the truth it conveys about the character or the character’s expectations. In “How I Met My Husband,” for instance, Loretta Bird says about Mrs. Peebles, “She wouldn’t find time to lay down in the middle of the day, if she had seven kids like I got.” The reader grasps the irony of this remark, since Loretta herself often “finds time” to sit gossiping at the Peebles’ farm instead of staying home with her children. Another effective example comes when Miss Brill, sitting in the park, thinks about the other people around her: “Other people sat on the benches and green chairs, but they were nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday, and – Miss Brill had often noticed – there was something funny about nearly all of them . . . from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even – even cupboards!” It is ironic that the judgment she makes of them is exactly the same one the story makes of her – even including the word “funny,” which the young girl later uses about her beloved fur. Miss Brill is unaware that her phrase “nearly always the same, Sunday after Sunday” describes her own behavior, which she unwittingly reveals when she thinks that she “had often noticed” them. And of course the irony of the statement about the “cupboards” they must have come from becomes overt when she returns at the end of the story to “her room like a cupboard.” Perhaps the most poignant of the dramatic ironies involving Miss Brill lies in her boastful thought, “Yes, I have been an actress for a long time,” for she has indeed created a fictitious role for herself – not that of a glamorous stage actress in a romantic musical, but that of a perceptive, happy, and self-­‐sufficient woman. 3. In irony of situation, usually the most important kind to fiction writers, the discrepancy is between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment, or between what is and what would seem appropriate. In “The Most Dangerous Game,” it is ironic that Rainsford, “the celebrated hunter,” should become the hunted, for this is a reversal of his expected and appropriate role. In “The Destructors,” it is ironic that Old Misery’s horoscope should read, “Abstain from any dealings in first half of week. Danger of serious crash,” for the horoscope is valid in a sense that is quite different from what the words appear to indicate. In “Hunters in the Snow,” it is ironic that inside the diner Frank and Tub encourage one another’s self-­‐indulgent behavior – Frank’s lust for a teenage babysitter, Tub’s gluttony – and view themselves as forming a noble, trusting alliance, when all the while their companion Kenny is lying wounded and freezing outside in the back of their truck. Irony, like symbol and allegory, is often a means for the author to achieve compression. By creating an ironic situation or perspective, the author can suggest complex meanings without stating them. In “Miss Brill,” we do not need to be told how difficult it is for an aging solitary woman to cope with her aloneness; we witness her plight and the incongruous means by which she attempts to deny it and therefore endure it. In “Hunters in the Snow,” we do not need to be told that these three hunting buddies are not “friends” in any meaningful sense of that word; we witness their cruel, self-­‐absorbed behavior. In these and other stories, the ironic contrast between appearances and reality generates a complex set of meanings. “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Emily Dickinson once advised this. One reason that irony is such an important technique is that a story, like other art forms, achieves its effects through indirection. In art, the truth must be produced indirectly because a flat statement – as in an essay, or a dry plot summary – can have no emotional impact on the reader. We must feel the truth a story conveys with our whole being, not simply understand it with our intellect. If a story has no emotional impact, it has failed as a work of art. Humor and irony are important because they help an author to achieve such an impact. A reader will not respond to a story, for instance, that contrives its emotions and attempts to “play upon” the reader’s feelings directly. An ironic method can help to temper and control the emotional content of a story, evoking responses that are intellectual and emotional all at once. Sentimentality By contrast, stories that try to elicit easy or unearned emotional responses are guilty of sentimentality. Sentimentality in fiction is not the same as genuine emotion; rather it is contrived or excessive emotion. A novel such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) for instance, often tries through contrived means to wring tears from the reader over the plight of African American slaves; for this reason, the novel is much less powerful as a work of art than Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which uses carefully restrained, artful language and a frequently biting irony in its castigation of slavery. A narrative contains genuine emotion when it treats life faithfully and perceptively. A sentimental narrative oversimplifies and exaggerates emotion in the attempt to arouse a similarly excessive emotion in the reader. Genuine emotion, like character, is presented indirectly – it is dramatized. It cannot be produced by words that identify emotions, like angry, sad, pathetic, heartbreaking, or passionate. A writer draws forth genuine emotion by producing a character in a situation that deserves our sympathy and showing us enough about the character and the situation to make them real and convincing. Sentimental writers are recognizable by a number of characteristics. 1. They often try to make words do what the situation faithfully presented by itself will not do. They editorialize – that is, comment on the story and, in a manner, instruct us how to feel. Or they overwrite and poeticize – use an immoderately heightened and distended language to accomplish their effects. 2. They make an excessively selective use of detail. Good writers use representative details while sentimentalists use details that all point one way – toward producing emotion rather than conveying truth. The little child who dies will be shown as always uncomplaining and cheerful under adversity, never as naughty, querulous, or ungrateful. It will possibly be an orphan or the only child of a mother who loves it dearly; in addition, it may be hungry, ragged, and possessed of one toy, from which it cannot be parted. The villain will be all villain, with a cruel laugh and a sharp whip, though he may reform at the end, for sentimentalists are firm believers in the heart of gold beneath the rough exterior. In short, reality will be unduly heightened and drastically oversimplified. 3. Sentimentalists rely heavily on the stock response – an emotion that has its sources outside the facts established by the story. In some readers certain situations and objects – babies, mothers, grandmothers, young love, patriotism – produce an almost automatic response, whether the immediate situation warrants it or not. Sentimental writers, to affect such readers, have only to draw out certain stops, as on an organ, to produce an easily anticipated effect. They depend on stock materials to produce a stock response. They thus need not go to the trouble of picturing the situation in realistic and convincing detail. 4. Sentimental writers present, nearly always, a fundamentally “sweet” picture of life. They rely not only on stock characters and situations but also on stock themes. For them, every cloud has its silver lining, every bad event its good side, every storm its rainbow. If the little child dies, it makes some life better by its death. Virtue is characteristically triumphant: the villain is defeated, the ne’er-­‐do-­‐
well redeemed. True love is rewarded in some fashion; it is love – never hate – that makes the world go round. In short, sentimental writers specialize in the sad but sweet. The tears called for are warm tears, never bitter. There is always sugar at the bottom of the cup. The writers we value most are able to look at human experience in a clear-­‐eyed, honest way and to employ literary techniques such as humor and irony as a way to enhance, not reduce, the emotional impact of their stories. Though not every first-­‐
rate story contains humor, there are few that do not involve some blend on the author’s part of human empathy and ironic detachment. After reading “Hills Like White Elephants,” and “Miss Brill,” for example, we experience a similarly blended response to the protagonists of these stories. A complex human reality requires a complex narrative technique, and in this way the best storytellers always have attempted to portray the whole of human experience – from its most tragic misery to its most absurd folly – in a single, integrated artistic vision. Works Cited Arp, Thomas R., and Greg Johnson. Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound & Sense. 11th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2012. Print.