rain and Beckett’s road. In each case, the sign carries with it a customary meaning, but that doesn’t
guarantee it will deliver that received meaning. The signifier is stable. The rain is neither ironic nor not
ironic; it’s simply rain. That simple rain, however, is placed in a context where its conventional
associations are upended. The signified’s meaning stands opposed to what we expect. Since one half of
the sign is stable and the other is not, the sign itself becomes unstable. It may mean many things, but what
it won’t mean is the thing we came in expecting that it would. Still, that expected meaning keeps hanging
around, and since we experience this phantom meaning as an echo at the same time as the newly created,
dominant meaning, all sorts of reverberations can be set off. It’s kind of like the way jazz improvisation
works. Jazz musicians don’t just launch into random sound; rather, the combo begins by laying out a
melody which is the basis for everything that will follow. Then, when the trumpeter or the pianist cuts
loose, running through the chorus two, three, fifteen times, each one a little different, we hear each of
those improvisations, those changes, against our memory of the original melody. That memory is largely
what makes the experience of the solo meaningful: this is where he started and now this is where he’s
taken us.
p. 240What irony chiefly involves, then, is a deflection from expectation. When Oscar Wilde has one
character in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) say of another, recently widowed, that “her hair
has gone quite gold from grief,” the statement works because our expectation is that stress turns people’s
hair white. Someone becoming blond in widowhood suggests something else entirely, that perhaps her
grief has not been so all-consuming as the pronouncement suggests on the surface. Wilde is the master of
comic irony in both verbal and dramatic forms, and he succeeds because he pays attention to
expectations. Verbal irony forms the basis for what we mean when we say irony. In ancient Greek
comedy, there was a character called an eiron who seemed subservient, ignorant, weak, and he played
off a pompous, arrogant, clueless figure called the alazon. Northrop Frye describes the alazon as the
character who “doesn’t know that he doesn’t know,” and that’s just about perfect. What happens, as
you can tell, is that the eiron spends most of his time verbally ridiculing, humiliating, undercutting, and
generally getting the best of the alazon, who doesn’t get it. But we do; irony works because the audience
understands something that eludes one or more of the characters. By the time we get to Wilde, we can
have verbal irony that needs no alazon but that uses an assumed innocence as the basis against which it
plays.
The irony with which we’re dealing in this discussion, though, is chiefly structural and dramatic rather
than verbal. We know what should happen when we see a journey start, or when the novel cycles
through the seasons and ends in spring, or when characters dine together. When what should happen
doesn’t, then we have Chesterton’s arrow.
E. M. Forster only wrote a handful of books early in the twentieth century, but two of them, A Passage
to India and Howards End (1910), are among the truly great novels. The latp. 241ter deals with the
class system and issues of individual worth. One of its important characters is a working-class man,
Leonard Bast, who is determined to improve himself. He reads books approved for the purpose, such as
John Ruskin on art and culture, he goes to lectures and concerts, always struggling to better himself. His
efforts do lead him to meet people of the higher classes, the bourgeois Schlegel sisters and, through them,
the aristocratic Wilcox family. We might expect this pattern to hold true and to lead him up and out of his
wretched existence; instead he ends up finding greater wretchedness and death where he had hoped for
his soul’s ascent. Henry Wilcox advises him, through Helen Schlegel, to leave his banking position for a
more secure firm, but the advice proves to be completely wrong, as his old bank continues to prosper
while his new post is eliminated. Moreover, in his despair he has spent a night with Helen that has left her
pregnant, and when Charles Wilcox attempts to exact retribution, Leonard dies of a heart attack. Irony,
right? But there’s more. We would normally see his love of books as something that is affirming of values,
improving, and educational—all of which we know as positive virtues. As Leonard collapses, however,
the last thing he sees are the books from the bookcase he has pulled over on himself. We sense the