Ian Watt, Irony and Criticism in Our Own Time

For me one of the most memorable aspects of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (reviewed here) is his discussion of the proneness of critics to read irony where there is often actually none--which specifically cited Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Virginia Woolf's readings of Daniel Defoe.

Defoe, in Watts' view, had no such attitude to the apparent contradictions in his characters' behavior--their combination of relentless money-grubbing and relentless, verbose declarations of their piety, for example. This was not only because such things did not look as ridiculously hypocritical to them as they do to people of our own time, but because a display of such irony required a level of technical mastery in this kind of "realist" writing that eighteenth century novelists had yet to achieve. Indeed, Defoe's sloppiness as a writer is something Watt discusses quite some length, replying to Woolf's declaration that Defoe subdued "every element to his design" with the opinion that there is no

design whatsoever in the usual sense of the term . . . such an interpretation really a kind of indirect critical repayment for the feeling of superiority which Defoe enables us to derive from his humble and unconsidered prose, a feeling of superiority which enables us to convert the extreme cases of his narrative gaucherie into irony . . .

There is far, far too much such "conversion of narrative gaucherie into irony" today--more than in his, more perhaps than in any other time in history--with at least some of it coming from people who ought to know better. (I hesitate to name names, but one recent critic whom I hold in a good deal of regard reviewed Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games in exactly this way, and then admitted that it was his way of spicing up the boring task of reviewing a book with such artless world-building--essentially, an admission that he wasn't doing his job of reviewing the book at all.) After all, in our postmodern day, the most inane subjective reaction can be held up as profound insight, and "irony for irony's sake" might be the critical slogan--irony for irony's sake because they cannot resist that "worst form of snobbery," because there is no better barrier to really thinking about anything than blowing it off in this pseudo-literate person's equivalent of the eternal "Whatever!"