Musings on Irony
As a student of Old English literature, I’ve always been struck by the fact there is always at least one scholar to invoke irony for every single piece of poetry that does not make immediate sense to the modern reader.
This reflex, it seems to me, would be fairly reasonable when confronted with a literature that does make a great use of irony (e.g. 18th c. French literature). On the other hand, it seems a bit off when dealing with a literary tradition which, as a whole, is not very big on irony.
I was recently working on something quite different from Old English, but suspicions of irony crept up again in the most unexpected fashion, which led me to write this note.
I am currently working on a translation of an extract from The Devil’s Advocate, by Morris West and one particular sentence is puzzling me:
“Nerone threw back his head and laughed as heartily as if it were a washerwoman’s joke down by the torrent.”
What puzzles me in this sentence is the expression “washerwoman’s joke.”
The genitive seems to imply a rather strong link between washerwoman and joke, as if that link was already known from the text itself or from common cultural knowledge (e.g. “my neighbour’s cat” suggests the reader already knows about this particular cat vs. “the cat of my neighbour” implies no such thing).
Here, washerwomen as such have nothing to do with the plot.
Clearly it is an image and the substance of the comparison seems to be that washerwomen tell good jokes and Nerone is reacting precisely as if he had just heard one such good joke, whereas we know from the text he just heard a dire warning and shouldn’t be laughing.
The puzzling thing for me is that the text seems to assume it is common knowledge washerwomen tell good jokes, which was new to me.
I asked two friends about it, one native speaker of English and one French girl with an extensive literary culture and both found irony, though not in the same place.
The French found irony in the name Nerone, allusion to the famous emperor who set fire to Rome.
The American found irony in the hearty laugh, assuming Nerone was not really laughing so much and that the allusion to the torrent meant you couldn’t even hear the joke and would thus merely fake a polite laugh and pretend you got it.
Admittedly, neither had the context of the whole passage (let alone the whole book!), so it was easier for them to read irony where there is none.
Still I found that puzzling, that when in doubt about the meaning of a passage, people tend to jump to the conclusion it must be ironic somehow.
I have no hypothesis regarding the source of that puzzling phenomenon, but would welcome
a) knowledge about the image of washerwomen in literature and the arts ;)
b) views or anecdotes about that tendency to assume irony when faced with something not immediately understandable.