odd_buttons (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
odd_buttons) wrote2004-11-13 09:17 am
odd_buttons) wrote2004-11-13 09:17 am
Irony
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Irony
Irony refers to the discrepancy between appearance and reality, surface and depth, ignorance and knowledge. Discordance, disagreement, incongruity, difference -- all are aspects of irony and all create tension. Fiction dances on tension.
Sarcasm is one form of irony -- the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant:
Irony can easily get too heavy-handed. That happens when the irony is based on a simple inversion of expectations -- Wendy, the sweet, sympathetic guidance counselor, turns out to be the psychopathic killer. It is true that for the audience there is an atavistic delight in the irony of the evil bank manager arrested for embezzlement and the brutal rancher trampled in a cattle stampede. But these ironies are mechanical, they're formulaic, they're too simplistic to take seriously.
Subtle irony occurs when characters don't get exactly what they want but, instead, get something less definite, less predictable, more puzzling. Since that pretty much sums up what happens in life, these more complex ironies characterize contemporary fiction.
There is an interesting relationship between irony and scale. The shorter the work of fiction, the subtler the ironies need to be. Short stories that depend on the irony of simple inversion can easily feel didactic, manipulated, or sentimental. The longer the work, the larger the ironies it can sustain. In Melville's Moby-Dick the hunted destroys the hunter, as obvious an irony as you can think of, but that catastrophe brings the book to a magnificent, powerful end. In Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, the hero ultimately believes he's traveled from ignorance to knowledge while Crane makes us see he's traveled from one kind of ignorance to another perhaps greater ignorance.
See Cliché, Formula, Plot, Poetic Justice, Tension.
Irony
Irony refers to the discrepancy between appearance and reality, surface and depth, ignorance and knowledge. Discordance, disagreement, incongruity, difference -- all are aspects of irony and all create tension. Fiction dances on tension.
Sarcasm is one form of irony -- the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant:
"Thanks a lot. I was hoping someone would drop a piano on my foot."Irony results when characters don't know something important. For example, Bartlett is bragging about how clever he is while the readers know his car has just been stolen. Irony can be funny or serious, comic or tragic. It can show a character is a fool because he doesn't realize what everyone else at the bar does -- the woman he's flirting with is really a man. Or it can show him to be a victim -- there was no way he could know that the bank never intended to give him the lone.
Irony can easily get too heavy-handed. That happens when the irony is based on a simple inversion of expectations -- Wendy, the sweet, sympathetic guidance counselor, turns out to be the psychopathic killer. It is true that for the audience there is an atavistic delight in the irony of the evil bank manager arrested for embezzlement and the brutal rancher trampled in a cattle stampede. But these ironies are mechanical, they're formulaic, they're too simplistic to take seriously.
Subtle irony occurs when characters don't get exactly what they want but, instead, get something less definite, less predictable, more puzzling. Since that pretty much sums up what happens in life, these more complex ironies characterize contemporary fiction.
There is an interesting relationship between irony and scale. The shorter the work of fiction, the subtler the ironies need to be. Short stories that depend on the irony of simple inversion can easily feel didactic, manipulated, or sentimental. The longer the work, the larger the ironies it can sustain. In Melville's Moby-Dick the hunted destroys the hunter, as obvious an irony as you can think of, but that catastrophe brings the book to a magnificent, powerful end. In Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, the hero ultimately believes he's traveled from ignorance to knowledge while Crane makes us see he's traveled from one kind of ignorance to another perhaps greater ignorance.
See Cliché, Formula, Plot, Poetic Justice, Tension.