Chapter 6

The Anatomy of Irony: Golding, Bellow, Galsworthy, O'Neill, Munro

Part of The Etymological Archive | Chapter thread: irony as a diagnostic instrument — holding two contradictory truths in the mind at once

The words in this chapter are double. They appear to mean one thing and mean another. That is not a fault — it is the method.

The Words

IRONY
- Origin: Greek eirōneia — simulated ignorance; from eirōn = one who deliberately underestimates himself, who knows more than he lets on
- Weight: Socrates was the classical ironist: he pretended to know nothing in order to get his interlocutor to reveal that they also knew nothing. That was an intellectual weapon, not a stylistic one. In literature: irony arises when what is said and what is meant diverge — and the reader sees it, even if the character does not. Golding's boys believe they are civilised; the reader knows they are not. That is irony's anatomy.
- Avoid instead: sarcasm, cynicism (sarcasm = to bite off flesh, Greek sarkazein — aggressive and superficial; cynicism = dog-like, from kynikos — a philosophical posture, not a rhetorical technique; irony is subtler than both)
- Write: Write a sentence that is ironic without being sarcastic. (Clue: let the character say something that reveals more about them than they know.)

CIVILISED / CIVILISATION
- Origin: Latin civilis — belonging to citizens; from civis = citizen, town-dweller; from -civ- = to dwell, to live (same root as civic, city, citizen)
- Weight: Civilisation is the town-dweller's self-image: we live in cities, we have laws, we are not barbarians. Lord of the Flies is an anatomical examination of how thin that self-image is. Golding's irony: the most civilised boys — the ones with authority, the well-raised ones — are the most dangerous. Civilisation is a varnish, not a foundation.
- Avoid instead: cultured, advanced
- Exercise: CIVILISED (civis, the citizen) and COLONIAL (colere, to cultivate, to settle) do not share a root — but colonialism kept putting them in the same sentence. What does that tell you about how it justified itself?
- Cross-reference: Chapter 5 COLONIAL

ANATOMY
- Origin: Greek anatomia — dissection; ana- (up, through) + temnein (to cut)
- Weight: Anatomy is to cut a thing open in order to see how it works. The ironists of this chapter work anatomically: Galsworthy cuts open the English middle class, O'Neill cuts open the family, Munro cuts open a life. To perform an anatomy of a society requires being close enough to see — and distant enough to cut.
- Avoid instead: analysis, examination
- Write: Choose a social phenomenon you recognise and write an anatomical sentence about it — a sentence that cuts through the surface to the mechanism.
- Connection: Chapter 1 DETACHED — the anatomist's gaze requires the detachment established in year one

ELLIPSIS
- Origin: Greek elleipsis — deficiency, omission; from elleipein = to leave behind, to leave out; ek- (out) + leipein (to leave)
- Weight: Ellipsis in grammar = an omitted but implied clause. In Munro's narrative art, the ellipsis is structural: the omitted is the most important. A woman is young, and then she is old, and what happened in between is what the story is really about — but it is told sideways, in a subordinate clause, as though it were not the centre. It is. It always is the centre.
- Avoid instead: gap, omission
- Exercise: Write three sentences about the same person with an ellipsis in the second: what happens if you fill it in? What happens if you don't?
- Cross-reference: Chapter 3 OBLIQUE — the ellipsis is the grammatical form of obliqueness