Gary MacLennan wrote:
> Nestor and Jose pointed out that my schema is overly
> Euro-centric. Again I agree. That is a persistent fault of mine and one
> that needs pointing out.
>
Any way in which irony would have helped this self-criticism. The only way I see that irony could have been incorporated would have been if the writer chose to reject the criticism and disarm the critics. That is, irony *always* serves one of two general purposes:
(1) Friendly incorporation into a temporary community of the listener or reader. This is the most common actually. And it is an essential role of irony because it often is a case in which paraphrase is really close to impossible. Two strangers huddle at a bus stop in a pouring rain and one of them, observing the other's rain coat, says "Why in the world are you hauling that heavy raincoat around on such a pleasant sunny day?" Obviously the meaning of that sentence has nothing to do with raincoats, rain, sun, etc. The shortest paraphrase would probably be several hundred words minimum.
(2) An attack on someone else.
One function irony *never* plays is that of self-criticism. When it appears to do so it is usually a concealed from of dogmatism -- i.e. it represents an uneasy feeling on the part of the speaker/writer that she/he holds those who disagree in contempt and a knowledge that an exhibition of that contempt would blunt the force of his/her argument. So a pseudo-irony of self criticism dissociates the speaker/writer from the personal attack on others concealed behind the irony.
I suspect that an anthology piece of (say) the 10 most famous instances of irony in European writing would pick mostly examples that illustrate all of these uses simultaneously. Platonic (socratic) irony, for instance, reenacts eternally the solidarity of the old Athenian aristocracy and a burning contempt for the peasantry, and its most distinguishing stylistic trait is its arrogant pretense of self-doubt or self-criticism. Surely there is no author of the last 2500 years so free from self-doubt as Plato. (Even his famous statement that his most essential thought could not be expressed in writing but only orally is, at root, a denial of the legitimacy of the public forum, in which the mob, i.e., the peasantry, dared to show themselves.)
And it is hard to imagine a warmier and fuzzier treatment of the audience (and by extension the author) then tragic irony -- with its expression of *our* superior understanding to that of the tragic protagonist. "And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again." Fool! Fool! the audience purrs. The irony of Swift and Austen, in somewhat different ways, enacts the contempt of one part of their readership to another part. This led a number of critics some decades ago (I don't know much of the present consensus among Swift critics) to argue that Swift's irony was unique in that it trapped the reader into seeing that he/she him/herself was the butt of the joke. But even that wonderful passage in *Tale of a Tub* climaxing with the reversal of "sublime peaceful state of a fool among knaves" is easily deflected by the reader to *other* readers.
Please note: this does not express an anti-irony position. It only denies one particular use of irony which some have claimed for it.
Stalin, incidentally, had a masterful command of irony.
Carrol