A rhetoric of irony

Wayne C. Booth. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1974.

According to Gregory Clark’s entry on Wayne Booth in Twentieth-Century Rhetorics and Rhetoricians, Booth’s writing “has been ‘about how we manage to get together, sometimes, in our efforts to reach a human truth, and why we so often fail to’” (Clark, 51). A confirmed pluralist, he is concerned with the function of literature for the formation of community, of conversation, and of agreement.

So why did Wayne Booth tackle the large, unwieldy and age-old topic of irony? Doesn’t irony in fact create a separation between those who get it, and those who don’t? Isn’t irony largely negative?

As a critic, Booth has likely been concerned with the way irony works in modern literature. After all, irony is present in much modern literature, and any career discussion of literature’s function should necessarily address it. Booth is also concerned with the characteristics of the ironic voices, and the mechanics of irony as different from metaphor, allegory and satire.

Booth’s work has also had an ethical project. For Booth, narratives are relationships between readers, authors and texts. He explores this idea further in The Company We Keep, noting that readers and authors engage in coduction, a continuing conversation in which we explore a text in terms of our experiences as readers and humans (and for Booth there is no difference). Irony is also a conversation, for Booth, and requires a lot of work on the part of readers to come to understand the author’s meaning.

In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, Booth is devoted to fighting the modern dogmas about knowledge and criticism. Irony and Booth’s theory of reconstruction fight against the dogmas. Not only does irony require openness and pluralistic thinking, it requires assent at many levels.

Booth’s preface to this work makes special mention of D.C. Muecke’s work Compass of Irony, published in 1969: “I wish that I could have read Mr. Muecke’s book before I wrote the first draft of mine; his help is evident everywhere in this final version, and I have again and again been tempted to say to my reader: go read Muecke and then we can carry on from there” (xiii). Muecke’s project is clear. He wants to define irony and describe irony in practice.

Muecke’s work provides us with a comprehensive laundry list of the ways irony exists, and the topics to which it is applied. Booth examines literature for irony and asks two important questions: “Is it ironic?” and “How do we know?” In literature, how do readers and authors achieve irony together?

Booth sees irony as intimacy, a way in which ironist and reader get together in a delicate dance of reconstruction of meaning. Booth’s work has always been concerned with the sharing of meaning and the creation of community. In A Rhetoric of Irony, he tries to illustrate that there are ways of knowing things – there is a kind of literary knowledge – and that ironic construction is a good example of the way in which this literary knowledge works. Irony brings substance to text rather than disintegrating them, and holds things together that may otherwise be destabilized.

Clark, Gregory C.. "Wayne Booth". Twentieth-century rhetorics and rhetoricians: critical studies and sources. Michael G. Moran and Michelle Ballif, editors. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.