Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigms by Candace D. Lang (review)

L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r that, by emphasizing the aesthetic so strongly, she misses W ittig’s critique of the dichotomy between aesthetic and political values. Nevertheless, this book presents Wittig’s five fic­ tional works as a coherent project for the first time. Its lucid commentary also helps to demystify Wittig’s supposed difficulty. It should lead the way to other serious engagements with W ittig’s work as literary art with a political mission. P a t r ic k M c G e e Louisiana State University Candace D. Lang. I r o n y / H u m o r : C r it ic a l P a r a d ig m s . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Pp. 236. Everything depends here, as Candace Lang’s carefully poised title clearly signals, not upon irony, nor upon humor, but upon the line drawn between them. That line—of sharp division, yet recurrent permeability, setting off one concept from another, one critical para­ digm from its contrary—comes most sharply into focus in Lang’s perceptive analysis of Roland Barthes’ autobiography (her paradigmatic instance of postmodern erasure of the barre between differences), yet its inevitable, unstable recurrence defines the coherence of her deconstructive survey of “ ironists,” both critical and literary, from the Romantic era to the present. Where and how, she inquires, should we draw the line between irony and humor—in theoretical terms, or historical terms, or evaluative terms? The ubiquitous presence of “ irony” in recent critical discourse, Lang plausibly argues, forces finer discriminations upon us. Lang draws her basic distinction from Kierkegaard, astutely noting how he both reveals and reenacts the gap between two variants of irony, a negative, Socratic sort and Plato’s dialectical, recuperative form. These two sorts are, for her, so distinct that she reserves the term, “ irony,” solely for the pre-modern variant. Most perfectly embodied in Romantic irony, this stance disjoins ironist from world and ultimate­ ly from self, irresistibly provoking a metaphysical nostalgia for truth and for presence. At least from the Romantic period on, however, certain ironic texts (unlike their myopic Anglo-American critics) have been marked by glimpses of the postmodern truth that there is no truth, no self, no essence behind world or word. The very projects congenial to a Romantic spirit—autobiography, self-expression—tend already in Stendhal and ever more in his successors to reveal the fragility of their epistemological assumptions, to shade, that is, into humor. As Lang’s knowledgeable survey of recent French criticism discloses, this distinction between irony and humor reaches conscious, programmatic articulation in such theorists as Lyotard, Barthes, and Deleuze. The line drawn by Lang works effectively as a conceptual distinction; it can helpfully illuminate the interplay of irony and humor in Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, or Proust. It works less well, however, as a neat historical divide separating modern and postmodern, relegat­ ing the former to metaphysical blindness and charting a remarkably straight, progressive course from Stendhal’s nostalgia towards Barthes’ celebration of deracination. Lang’s broader argument tends to reinscribe a curiously stable, even developmental literary his­ tory, evident in the Kierkegaardian ring of Lang’s final words on Stendhal, “ But before plunging headlong into humor, self-consciousness will have to assume, and exorcise, meta­ physical despair” (95). Thus, the postscript’s assertion that “ postmodern literature’s and poststructuralist theory’s preoccupation with language and subjectivity has nothing in com­ mon with the narcissistic, onanistic, and potentially solipsistic discourse commonly termed romantic irony” (195) seems rather too anxious to absolutize its own distinctions, a bit lacking, itself, in the humor this text would praise. 108 S u m m e r 1992 B o o k R ev iew s Lang’s own playfulness and perceptiveness are more pleasurably evident in her fine, closely critical reading of Barthes’ Roland Barthes, or in her careful discussions of the shift­ ing aims in Stendhal’s and Proust’s earlier and later prose. Lang also shows herself to be a gifted analyst of style, as in her analysis of Proust’s metaphors. Yet her text would claim more than this for “ hum or,” marking...