Performing Irony: Eugène Ionesco's Battles With His Critics

Abstract

After Aristotle's first definition of irony as duality: blame-by-praise or praiseby-blame 1 , and Cicero's first use of "ironia", attested by The Oxford English Dictionary, irony has been defined as "a figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt", or as a "condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected" 2 . D.C. Muecke's comprehensive The Compass of Irony which analyses the formal qualities of irony and offers a survey of its various forms, functions and cultural significance started on an astute comment pointing to the impossibility of formally defining irony: "Since […] Erich Heller, in his Ironic German, has already quite adequately not defined irony, there would be little point in not defining it all over again" 3 . Muecke's next book, Irony and the Ironic, devised 15 descriptive types of irony that the English literary-educated person would recognize 4 , traced the evolution of the concept, and investigated its anatomy.Wayne Booth asserted that "[r]eading irony is in some ways like translating, like decoding, like deciphering and like peering behind a mask" 5 and devised four "marks of irony": irony is always intended, not unconscious; it is covert ("intended to be reconstructed with meanings different from those on the surface"); it is stable or fixed ("in the sense that once a reconstruction of meaning has been made, the reader is not then invited to undermine it with further demolitions and reconstructions"); finally, it is "finite in application", since "[t]he reconstructed meanings are in some sense local, limited" 6 . Booth explained that these marks do not suffice to distinguish irony from other verbal devices saying something and intending another (metaphor, simile, allegory, apologue, metonymy, synecdoche, asteismus, micterismus, charientismus, preterition, banter raillery, burlesque, and paronomasia) 7 . This is not the only limitation of fully comprehending irony, and 1