The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [93]
Irony is an area where artistic intentions are crucial to aesthetic understanding, and the problems it creates are not just relevant to literature occur across all the arts. Consider Richard Strauss’s only work piano and orchestra, his Berleske of 1885. The innocent listener who supposes the piece to be a straightforward attempt to compose a one-movement piano concerto will no doubt find it attractive and rewarding. But the meaning of Strauss’s mad double-octave passages, which evaporate at the top of the keyboard (rather than leading into big cadences), the long runs that go nowhere, will elude such a listener. In this the composer has helpfully provided a title that gives a hint that work is intended in part as a send-up of the Romantic virtuoso concerto. But authors are not always so helpful; and in any event, whether they are is immaterial so far as the purely conceptual question is concerned.
Literary irony makes ridiculous Barthes’s grand claim that writing “destruction of every voice.” The very possibility of irony—of understanding it or of getting it wrong—shows that artistic creation inescapably involves a specific human voice: the voice of an author. Naturally, skillful ironists may supply their readers with few conventional clues ironic intent, and to that extent may seem to be letting their texts “speak themselves.” The ironist unsure of his audience’s sophistication, Buchwald).
The anti-intentionalist may still insist that it is the business of criticism to provide an interpretation under which the work, intentions aside, is seen as the richest, the most rewarding, the most profound. The loso pher Laurent Stern has claimed that if we agree that a text is work of art, “then among two competing interpretations that may equally fit the text, the one which assigns greater value and significance the text will be preferred.” Stern is attempting to discredit the idea that ironic works are decisive in proving the need for author’s intentions textual interpretation. Thus he tells us that Daniel Defoe’s “Shortest Way with the Dissenters” admits of two interpretations, literal and ironic, but it is a far better work understood as a piece of irony, even without any external evidence. Similarly, he recommends reading Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” as ironic because it would be difficult to understand at all if taken literally.
These examples support Stern’s argument: they are fine works, much better seen as what they are, as ironic. But turn things around moment and consider bad art, works like Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. There is no doubt that Bach intended this little book think of it as a very long greeting card) to be a serious work of literature with important messages for the human spirit. But it arguably would have had greater value and significance had he meant it as a lampoon, a send-up of inspirational literature: then one could genuinely laugh with it, instead of at it. Yet even if it is seen in the best light when taken as ironic, we cannot do so if we have sufficient evidence that Bach not intend it to be so taken. To do so would be to endow the work with an illusory significance and value.
It is not up to interpreters arbitrarily to impose conventions in order produce an interpretation that puts the work in the best possible light: this stretches charity beyond the limit. To describe such literary notables William McGonagall (“the World’s Worst Poet”) and Julia A. Moore more affectionately known as “the Sweet Singer of Michigan”), the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock coined the term “supercomic.” Ogden Nash and Edward Lear are comic poets. To be supercomic, poet must write stunningly bad verse and do so with great earnestness. It is a category that depends for its very existence on an author’s having intentions of a certain sort, specifically not ironic. As it is, there are no conventions at all peculiar to supercomic verse: seriousness of purpose