“Not The Truth But The Way”: The Ethics Of Irony In World Literature

Abstract

Scholars have dismissed literary irony for many reasons; two common objections contend that the device facilitates social disengagement disguised as textual play and that it requires of the reader such extensive social, historical, and linguistic knowledge that it cannot be fully appreciated outside its context of production. In “‘Not the truth but the way’: The Ethics of Irony in World Literature” I refute these myths and demonstrate that the device’s social engagement facilitates readers’ understanding of both irony and the socio-historical context that the author describes in the work. I first tackle claims about the device’s capacity for ethical social engagement. In contradiction to Anglo-American formalism and its resonances in subsequent schools of literary theory, Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of controlled irony provides a framework for understanding how it operates as a mode of social critique. The fact that the device can function in this socially engaged way both challenges the assertion that irony is always apolitical and signals to the reader the author’s socio-political concerns. In analyzing a moment of indirect critique, readers learn about the defining concerns of the author’s context; in this way, irony can function as an Ansatzpunkt, Erich Auerbach’s term for a point of departure, through which readers learn about different nations, cultures, and eras. I analyze three world literary texts—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and two twentieth-century adaptations of it, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Wilson Harris’s The Infinite Rehearsal—to illustrate this idea. Not only can irony be socially engaged and be understood outside its original context, the device also facilitates the circulation of world literature in the global marketplace. Irony thus contributes to cross-cultural understanding, an ethical stage necessary to the process of historical development.