The Roots of Irony as Language
Part I.
Anthony Servante, G.E.D.
Introduction:
Irony is not funny in and of itself. It is no more comical than a noun clause or a coordinating conjunction. It is a grammatical tool for communication. The problem is, however, that not everyone speaks the language let alone understands the language of irony. Consider your own use of the English language. If I were to ask you what a "predicate" is, you might answer, "It is the part of the sentence that shows what the subject is doing", and then you'd wait for me to give you a gold star for your little Kindergarten notebook with Pikachu on the cover, and yet, your answer would be wrong. Sure you earned a gold star because you know what the correct answer the teacher expects, but you don't know what it means. If you look up "give" in the dictionary, you'll find, "to give"; antonym: "to take". And round and round you go. You have the right answers straight from the teacher and right out of the dictionary, but you don't understand what has been communicated to you. You are learning circular answers that avoid any understanding of the question.
We have the same problem with "irony": What is irony? Not the answer, but the understanding.
I will try to share my understanding of irony from its use as a tool of communication, as I've learned from my studies over the years, and examine the words of the scholars from Soren Kierkegaard, to Sigmund Freud, to S.I. Hiyakawa, to Wayne C. Booth, and, of course, add my middling two cents worth of knowledge. I will attempt to avoid pat answers and circular explanations. Instead, I shall select a direction and head that way, hoping to meet you at the end of the path. So, even though you are on the reading side of the writing, and I am on the writing side, let's try to rendezvous where the two sides meet. See you there.
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The Two Ironies: Concept and Concrete.
What Kierkegaard sought to explain in The Concept of Irony was "the concept". (As we will see later with Hiyakawa, we must distinguish the "map" from the "territory"). For Kierkegaard, the concept is the map of irony. How the map is used gets us to the location we desire to visit. In this sense, we choose to communicate and the other is to whom we choose to communicate.
The two ironies at work includes the one within our head, formulating, planning, organizing; and the second one, outside ourselves, responding, reacting, understanding. From thought to action. There is the subjective self at work and the objective other as the target. Herein, we communicate. However, because the mode of communication is irony, a unspoken meaning emerges. I think, What a fine morning, and tell my wife, Good morning, my intention being to convey the state of the day as I see it, and my wife can understand that I have have a good opinion of the day; however, she may also understand that unspoken, mysterious meaning: What did he mean by that "Good morning"? beyond the state of the day.
In Kierkegaard's words, "But just as there is something deterring about irony, it likewise has something extraordinarily seductive and fascinating. Its masquerading and mysteriousness, the telegraphic communication it prompts because an ironist always has to be understood at a distance, the infinite sympathy it presupposes, the fleeting but indescribable I stand of understanding that is superseded by the anxiety of misunderstanding". In other words, the language is comprised of words and sentences with grammatical rules and constructs, yet we see between the lines of the language to acknowledge a "mysterious" meaning at play. Two people communicate yet the meaning of the communication is like a "mask", leaving the subject and the other more distant from each other than before they communicated. Intentions are misunderstood. We cannot see the forest for the trees, so to speak.
The Joke
Sigmund Freud, in "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious", discussed how words and ideas could be mixed or reformed to create ambiguous meaning, what he called "metaphoric meaning", that is, a mechanism for the joke to travel between the parties.
Clear communication indicated, in essence, a direct translation of idea to meaning, such as "that tree" refers to an object that I point to without ambiguity. But if I refer to "that tree" and point to the moon, then I introduce ambiguity. The indirect translation is no longer of the referent (that specific tree) but an unclear or confusing communication of a different object as the referent (the moon). The word "tree" matches "that tree", whereas the word "tree" no longer matches "that moon". The mismatch conveys the joke.
For Freud, the joke communicated contradictions to reach that unconscious level of understanding. The tree/moon mix no longer communicates a clear connection to the right listener. So, the listener is likely to laugh or think a mistake has been made. To the person who laughs, there was some communication at the unconscious level. The person who hears/sees a mistake misunderstands the metaphoric meaning because his conscious interpretation is confused. How can a tree be the moon?!
Stable and Unstable Irony
Wayne C. Booth in "A Rhetoric of Irony" explains how irony is ambiguous for two reasons: Firstly, "double meaning" can convey a contrast between fiction and nonfiction, or real and unreal. Booth calls this form of communication, "stable irony". For example, if I say, "I will never die", I mean, "I will die". However, the degrees which Booth here calls "distance" comes in the form of circumstances for which the irony is applied. If I were in my 90s, on my death bed, and I tell my loved ones, "I will never die", the meaning "I will die soon" is clearer to the loved ones, whereas, if a teenager told his friends, "I will never die", his youth betrays a cocky confidence that is absent from the old man saying the same thing. The "distance" of meaning for the old man to his bedside family is closer given the circumstances, while the "distance" for the young man and his friends is much farther apart given his age. The phrase "I will never die" has "different rhetorical purposes" for each person who uses it in their particular circumstances.
Secondly, Booth asserts that "unstable irony" does not communicate its purpose. It is deliberately vague, uncertain, and ambiguous. This definition is closer to Freud view of the Joke, but with Freud, the joke does communicate intent, whereas with Booth, unstable irony engages but does not explain. In the case of saying "the tree" while pointing at the moon, what is communicated?
To Freud, there was only communication with the person who laughed at the joke (the ambiguity); the non-laugher was puzzled, not deliberately so; they just didn't get the joke. To Booth, true unstable irony does not announce its intentions. Whether you laugh or not, a tree is not the moon. The listener must be willing to have a type of suspension of disbelief for irony for it to be unstable. "Conflicting meanings" holds such irony together for such a listener.
The Map is not the Territory
S. I. Hayakawa, in "The Use and Misuse of Language", maintains a simple premise for language: Language, in and of itself, is not the intent. Communication is the intent. Just as "the map is not the territory", the language is not the meaning. What we understand is the territory here. For Hayakawa, irony would be the map, for irony was just another form of language.
For instance, no matter the language, the moon is the moon. La Luna, in Spanish, is not the moon. That thing up in the sky is the moon. In Art, there's a painting that is titled, This is not an Apple (sic), but what you have is a perfectly painted apple on the canvas. For Hayakawa, Art was just another language.
Irony, in this sense, still must convey meaning. Otherwise, it would be gibberish. But irony does require a sender and a receiver. Irony cannot work in a vacuum. A map of nowhere conveys nothing, no direction, no territory. How then does Hayakawa explain irony as language? One, the referent and reality (that is, the word "moon" and the round thing in the sky we call moon) contrast (just as "tree" contrasts with our pointing to the moon); two, the speaker and listener are "context-dependent" on communication (the listener must understand "joke" when the speaker says tree and points to the moon); and three, the speaker and listener must communicate with the new meanings of irony consistently, for any language to work, it must be consistent whether by map or territory.
Irony as Paradox: Neuro-Integrity
As we have seen, irony as language requires similar uses: Ambiguity, contrast, and context in order to communicate intent. But in the world today, communicating intent is not so clear cut. As we've seen, irony is just not understood by everyone. For some, the ambiguity is mistaken for error or misspoken intent. How many times have you made a joke, for instance, and no one understands it. Yet many of these same people understand puns and other play on words. I once told a fellow teacher in the English department that I was working on a paper on the paradox of paradigms. He responded, "Like a pair of doctors?!" The other teachers laughed and said, "Good one." I stood there in dismay, and they misunderstood my dismay by asking, "Don't you get it? A pair of doctors. A paradox!" Maybe I was the weird one there.
But no. We were just wired differently. That's what I'd like to address here. The neurology of irony. Why some people get it, and others don't.
The Brain's Do's and Don'ts.
The thalamic region of the brain is the relay center for receiving and sending neuro signals; incoming from the five senses come via the sympathetic nervous system; outgoing come from the parasympathetic nervous system. A cold breeze passes over your warm skin, and a cool sensation is transmitted from your skin along neuro transmitters to the brain, namely, the thalamus. There the signal is translated to a chill and send back to the skin via the parasympathetic system. When the point of origin receives the message, you get goosebumps. Yes, very simplistic explanation. Why? To explain the language of irony via the nervous system and why some people get it and others don't.
The thalamus doesn't work the same for everyone. There are those who are born with a natural curiosity. As children, they take their toys apart and put them back together because they want to know how they work. But some rebuild the toys exactly as it was before it was taken apart, while others put it back together into a better working toy. Both types of children have the same skills, but one has a better imagination. They can imagine how the toy can work better when they understand how it works. Those who lack such imagination rebuild the toys exactly as it was before the dissection. Same skills, different point of view. But the person with imagination for improvement can picture the toy in a new way and proceed to rebuild it that way, whereas the person who sees the toy only as it was before can only rebuild it as it was before.
So, where does one's point of view come from then? So, where does one's point of view come from then? It comes from the thalamus, but how the brain center is influenced varies in both culture and neurology. If a child is punished for taking the toy apart, his skill at dismantling is suppressed by punishment for "breaking" the toy. The child can put the toy back together, but he will never get the chance since it is considered broken. The child who is given only one toy and no more learns to disassemble the toy and reassemble it into something new, something better. One child fears punishment, the other appreciates preservation as reward. The former learns taking the toy apart is bad, while the latter learns that he can make the toy last longer by caring for it and modifying it.
The child who fears punishment develops neurological pathways that may lead to pain should he use his skill. The child who rewards himself by using his skill to create new toys from the old develops neurological pathways that lead to pleasure. They are both born with a thalamus but circumstance, context, and emotion influence the development of the pathways that suppress or encourage the flow of neuro input and output to and from the thalamic region.
A suppressed background of punishment can lead to "defense mechanisms" triggered by fear when certain neuro pathways are crossed. For instance, "denial" and "repression" block unwanted thoughts by calling them false. To recall the spanking we received for "breaking" our expensive toy may prevent us from trying to fix that flat tire, saying it's the job for a professional. Though he may have that skill to fix a flat, change those bathroom pipes, or repair that stove, that same skill is buried beneath a culture of punishment and a lifelong neurological enforcement of avoiding this skill.
The child who grew up without these type of "defense mechanisms" may have a more developed skill and a more active imagination. The combination of skill and imagination trigger the neuro pathways leading creating something new from the old. He has no trouble fixing a flat, doing the plumbing work at home, or repairing the stove, because, like the improved rebuilt toy, you extend the life of the old toy, just as you improve the car, the pipes, and the stove. Why buy new ones when you can fix the old.
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Coming soon...
The Use of Irony as Language
Part II
