Linda Hutcheon's study Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1994) notes that the traditional assumption about the "intentionality" of irony places agency entirely in the author's hands, such that the responsible reader should make it her business to discover what the author's intentions were and to read accordingly. As the conservative traditionalist E.D. Hirsch, Jr. asserts, an author's original intention is "an historical event" which can-- and, ethically, should be reconstructed by the reader or scholar. When the position is stated in this way, however, I find myself flooded with a host of doubts; as a writer, and as someone who talks often to other writers about their work, I know full well that the construct "intentions" is treacherously slippery. More often than not, "intentions" do not operate on the most conscious level of the creating mind at the very moment of composition; awareness of them slips in later-- sometimes much later, even well after the publication of the work.

Hutcheon describes a process considerably more complicated than Hirsch's reliance on the conscious, explicit intentionality of the author:

The major players in the ironic game are indeed the interpreter and the ironist. The interpreter may-- or may not-- be the intended addressee of the ironist's utterance, but s/he (by definition) is the one who attributes irony and then interprets it: in other words, the one who decides whether the utterance is ironic (or not), and then what particular ironic meaning it might have. This process occurs regardless of the intentions of the ironist (and makes me wonder who really should be designated as the "ironists"). This is why irony is "risky business": there is no guarantee that the interpreter will "get" the irony in the same way as it was intended. In fact, "get" may be an inaccurate and even inappropriate verb: "make" would be much more precise.(11)
Hutcheon sees irony as coming into being "in the relations between meanings, but also between people and utterances and sometimes, between intentions and interpretations." (12) She describes it as "transideological"-- that is, as politically slippery and tricky. In view of my reading that reading A Civil Campaign ironically allows Bujold to have her cake and eat it too, I am struck by Hutcheon's quotation from Julian Barnes' novel, Flaubert's Parrot, in which the narrator talks of Flaubert's "booby-trapped" ironies:
That is the attraction, and also the danger, of irony: the way it permits a writer to be seemingly absent from his work, yet in fact hintingly present. You can have your cake and eat it; the only trouble is, you get fat.
In this case, if it is I who am the principal ironist (and not Bujold), then it is I, who am reading the novel ironically, who runs the risk of getting fat. I think I prefer the more generous image of Steve Swartz, a friend of mine. Irony, he says, is a gift the reader brings to the work. If that is so, the lavish scale of my attempt to infuse my reading with irony puts me among the ranks of the wealthiest, most magnificent philanthropists.




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