Corneille's Irony (review)

While the significance of irony in the works of his younger contemporaries Molière, Pascal and Racine has long been recognized, Corneille has traditionally been seen as more ironized against than ironizing. Indeed, the dominant cliché of the Cornelian hero as a self-determining subject rather than victim of fate sits uneasily with something as problematic and destabilizing as irony. Nina Ekstein's Corneille's Irony offers a welcome, timely and nuanced corrective to this critical blind-spot. While insisting that irony is not 'a systematic feature of Corneille's dramaturgy' (p. 183), Ekstein's study amply demonstrates the range of ironic modes and devices that surface in his theatre: 'dramatic irony, the irony of fate, echoic mention, parody, sarcasm, exaggeration, coincidence, raillerie, incongruity, reversal of fortune, changes of register, and contradiction, to name only some' (p. 1). Ekstein is quite right to present her work as 'a reframing and an eclectic exploration of the problem of irony' (p. 1); in effect, Corneille offers her a complex range of material through which to explore wider questions about the theory and practice of the ironic. Indeed, one of the strengths of Ekstein's work is that its reflections, implications and methodologies extend well beyond Corneille, and will be of interest and importance to scholars of theatre, literature and rhetoric more generally. Irony, Ekstein admits, is a 'daunting' subject to define and explore because of its multiplicity of meanings and forms (p. 2). This is, she persuasively argues, because uncertainty is so inherent to the process of irony that the distinction between irony and sincerity is impossible to demarcate with any certainty. Irony is contagious; once established, the doubt it sets in motion risks contaminating even the unironic. The methodological risks of this —the temptation to see irony everywhere —are fortunately allayed by the study's bipartite structure; while the first four chapters discuss examples where irony is clearly intended, the critical tools amassed in this first part help Ekstein to explore less clear-cut cases of irony in the second. While, perhaps inevitably, examples of possible irony become increasingly subjective as the book progresses, Ekstein acknowledges and conscientiously resists the temptation to see irony where it is not present. Very occasionally this conscientiousness can become frustrating. In her crucial discussion of Sabine's sincerity in repeatedly asking for death in Horace, Ekstein meticulously weighs up the arguments for and against an ironic reading but without offering a satisfactory interpretation of her own; even here, though, her analysis and assessment of possible alternative readings is rich and fruitful. A real strength of this study is that in exploring irony's often fraught relationship to more familiar elements of Corneille's dramaturgy (surprise, heroism, comedy) or to other forms of double discourse (sarcasm, lies, role-play), Ekstein sheds a revealing critical light on these other devices too. Indeed, while the conceptual unwieldiness of irony occasionally produces logical inconsistencies (if sarcasm 'is in no way ambiguous' [p. 39] then 'possible sarcasm' [p. 41] must presumably only be possibly unambiguous . . .), this is a genuinely successful, thought-provoking and important study.