capacity to choose is taken away, evil is replaced not with goodness but with a hollow simulacrum of
goodness. Because he still wants to choose evil, he is in no way reformed. In acquiring the desired
behavior through the “Ludovico Technique,” as the aversion therapy is called in the novel, society has not
only failed to correct Alex but has committed a far worse crime against him by taking away his free will,
which for Burgess is the hallmark of the human being.
In this regard, and only in this one, is Alex a modern version of Christ, Those other aspects are a bit of
ironic winp. 244dow dressing the author embeds in his text as cues for how to understand Alex’s story
and the message he unwittingly conveys.
Nearly all writers employ irony sometimes, although the frequency of occurrence varies greatly. With
some writers, particularly modern and postmodern writers, irony is a full-time business, so that as we
read them more and more, we come to expect that they will inevitably thwart conventional expectations.
Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, and T. Coraghessan
Boyle are only a few of those twentieth-century masters of the ironic stance. If we were wise, we would
never open a Boyle novel or short story expecting him to do the conventional thing. Some readers find
relentless irony difficult to warm to, and some writers find that being ironic carries perils. Salman
Rushdie’s irony in The Satanic Verses did not register with certain Muslim clerics. So there’s our second
ironic precept: irony doesn’t work for everyone. Because of the multivocal nature of irony—we hear
those multiple voices simultaneously—readers who are inclined toward univocal utterances simply may
not register that multiplicity.
For those who do, though, there are great compensations. Irony—sometimes comic, sometimes tragic,
sometimes wry or perplexing—provides additional richness to the literary dish. And it certainly keeps us
readers on our toes, inviting us, compelling us, to dig through layers of possible meaning and competing
signification. We must remember: irony trumps everything. In other words, every chapter in this book
goes out the window when irony comes in the door.
How do you know if it’s irony?
Listen.
27 – A Test Case
p. 245THEGARDENPARTY
by Katherine Mansfield
And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if
they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of
light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns
and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to
shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that
impress peop. 246pie at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.
Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as
though they had been visited by archangels.