Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (review)

BOOK NOTES final two sections look beyond the "imagetext" itselfand consider how it functions in society. In examining the relations between pictures and power, Mitchell adopts Foucault's model to the double demands of representation. Whereas illusionism involves power over subjects, he argues, realism involves power directed at objects. Translated into the social arena, this opposition assumes the form ofspectacle and surveillance, which "epitomize the basic dialectic between illusionism and realism in contemporary visual culture" (327). By contrast, Mitchell (after Habermas) imagines the public sphere as a place outside the realm of power, a scene where verbal and visual discourses circulate freely. Looking outward from this Utopian space, public art, film, and television attempt to penetrate and transform the codes of modern visual culture. Picture Theory is not only a welcome contribution to word and image studies, in short, but a basic text that is destined to become a classic. By any standards it is an exceptional achievement. Willard Bohn Illinois State University LINDA HUTCHEON. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. viii + 248 pp. Linda Hutcheon's essay on irony betokens more than the author's evolution from her 1 984 book on Narcissistic Narrative. It also bears witness to a fairly general transformation of criticism over the last 10 years. Her famed works on metafiction, parody (1985), and postmodernism (1988 and 1989) reflect the last decade's gradual shift from textual to contextual approaches, or from the "poetics of . . ." to the "politics of . . .," so to speak. In this light, both the title and subtitle ofthe new book are highly relevant: her essay sees irony as an "edgy" discourse (37) that "would seem to ingratiate and to intimidate, to underline and to undermine . . . bring[ing] people together and drivfing] them apart" (56). It is the ironic "edge" that renders irony a political phenomenon and Hutcheon's account a political one, interested in how ironic situations "bring people together" or "drive them apart." In other words, the "politics of irony" draws on the various responses ironic discourse elicits from various communities. In effect, community may well be the essay's core notion. To my knowledge, Linda Hutcheon's analysis is the first to focus systematically not on the community of"insiders" that irony sets up but on the extant communities that specifically react to ironic messages. "It is not so much," she points out, "that irony creates communities or in-groups; instead, I want to argue that irony happens because what could be called 'discursive communities' already exist and provide the context for both the deployment and attribution of irony" (18). Irony's Edge thus lays down the terms for a pragmatics ofirony, more precisely, for a pragmatic approach to the responses ironic enunciations prompt. Unlike rhetorical (Wayne Booth) or philosophical inquiries (Jankélévich) into the production ofirony, this book draws our attention to the ways in which "discursive communities" respond to irony. It is not the "ironist" that attracts the critic, but the "interpreter." The latter "attributes" ironic meaning to a message according to his/ her specific and sociocultural background. Irony, Linda Hutcheon claims, is enVoI . 20 (1996): 202 THE COMPAnATIST dowed with a "transideological identity" (15, 27, 35, etc.). It can be "both political andapolitical, both conservative andradical, both repressive anddemocratizing." Its political meaning—and very presence—may be ignored, read offfrom, orjust read into texts and images depending upon the groups to which the readers belong. In mis regard, Linda Hutcheon's pluralist view of irony addresses a concrete, multicultural urgency. She convincingly argues that ironic meaning is fundamentally "relational," bringing "together ... the said and the unsaid, each of which takes on meaning only in relations to the other" (59). Irony does not only "dissemble ," as its Greek etymology suggests; as a "relational strategy," it also reunites people and meanings. Most importantly, while underscoring the contribution of "discursive communities" to the actual enactment of ironic connotations, the critic rejects the canonical definition ofirony as antiphrasis (58). Ironic discourse does notjust mean different things to different people; these meanings (interpretations) need not write each other off since the ironic signification, the "unsaid," is not simply the opposite ofthe "said...