The Limits of Irony Berel Lang (bio) Irony... disciplines and punishes. Kierkegaard If my title is not ironic—and it isn't—it must be tendentious, since it implies that irony has limits and so invites only the question of what or where they are. But the basis for this assumption is not self-evident, and indeed the emphasis in modern theories of irony runs directly counter to it. This more common view finds irony limit less, with its characteristic starting point in a contradiction or reversal that then evokes an indefinite number of further displacements. On this account, one ironic turn opens the way to another and that one opens on still another, with no nonironic end in sight except for the ironic consciousness itself with its denial of any stopping point that might interrupt its own continuing reflection. On this view, irony initiates (more precisely, takes place in) an infinite movement—perhaps regress, perhaps progress—that violates the supposed boundaries of every context in which it appears: it is irony that irony affirms, not just this or that single turn. Thus, irony discloses its purpose not in its individual assertions or truths but in the common manner of their rendering; in this sense irony is an adverb, not a noun—insatiable in its appetite in a way that "persons, places, or things" could not be even if they imagined or willed that state. Kierkegaard's view at the beginning of his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony, of irony's "infinite absolute negativity" 1 may seem too burdensome for merely human practice, and indeed that view later turns out to be too weighty even for him. But master-ironist that he was, his opening description of irony's apparently limitless reach warrants attention, and not only because in it he echoes, at least for this one time, his antagonist of choice, Hegel. I shall later be disputing this view of irony and propose an alternative to it, but we do well to look first at the process leading to its historical dominance. This scrutiny is the more pertinent because irony does not openly admit its expansionist design. More typically, it avoids speaking of itself at all—and just this reticence motivated the critic and aesthetician Jean-Paul's proposal for an "irony mark" to serve, like the question mark [End Page 571] or the exclamation point, as a means of identification: readers could then be confident of recognizing an ironic text when they met one. But Jean-Paul's idea never caught on, evidently because it would be self-defeating. The avowal by ironic statements of their "point" or even of their identity as ironic could only undermine the effect they strive for: to have the reader himself, as the writer's "double," infer and then inscribe the ironic conclusion in its reversal of the assertions offered at face value (at one-face value, that is) by the writer. We thus look to the ironic text for what it omits at least as much as for what it acknowledges; its ironic claims, fittingly, are the more present for being the more absent. Admittedly, other literary tropes or figures—metaphor, allegory—typically also avoid announcing themselves; for them, too, blatancy is self-defeating or, more basically, antifigurative. (Figurative language that cited itself as figurative might turn that reference too into a figure of speech—perhaps under the title of "truth" or "candor." 2 ) Even allowing for this reticence, however, individual figures often do provide clues of figurative design—all of them, for example, involving deviation from a linguistic norm. None, however, displays irony's combination of contradiction and then subordination of what is first "literally" affirmed. The characteristic reversal in oxymoron, for example, emphasizes a specific quality (the "silence" of "loud silence"), not contradiction as such. Similarly for catachresis—assigning a figurative term where no literal term exists (the "leg" of a chair)—and for aporia, which in so many words places its subject beyond words, as ineffable: although perhaps hinting beyond their immediate referents, these make no claim to represent a mode of consciousness. By contrast, the reversals of irony, in addition to turning sentences or texts back...