By HENRIQUE BRAGA & MARCELO MODOLO*
Ironic statements are dangerous, misunderstood and, more recently, must be accompanied by the warning “contains irony”
In his “Posthumous Memoirs,” there is a passage in which the narrator Brás Cubas – the illustrious “deceased author” of Machado de Assis – recounts his burial, which was attended by only eleven friends. At a certain point, one of them decides to give a laudatory speech, full of clichés, to honor the deceased. After mentioning this tribute, Brás Cubas says: “Good and faithful friend! No, I do not regret the twenty policies I left you.”
This is one of many passages in which the renowned irony of Machado de Assis, our greatest prose writer, can be identified: in the passage, when linking the funeral speech to the inheritance left to the speaker, the narrator suggests that the motivation for the praise did not exactly come from the kindness or loyalty of the other: although the speaker verbalizes “good and faithful friend”, he himself gives clues, as if he were giving us a wink, so that the reader can interpret his statement the other way around.
If our most celebrated writer has irony as one of his trademarks, we could suggest that such an expressive resource is a national symbol, a mark of Brazilianness, an intangible heritage of ours, right? No. On the contrary, there are signs that ironic statements are dangerous, misunderstood and, more recently, that they should be accompanied by the warning “contains irony” – something similar to what has been done, in this case correctly, on the packaging of certain foods, with the labels “high in sodium”, “high in sugar”, etc.
A little experiment
We did a test. In an exercise of love for the sciences of language, we faced the universe of comments on social networks. For this experiment, we chose a post of Folha de S. Paul, with a curious headline, to say the least: “Black man is reported for racial abuse after saying that his white uncle has the 'mind of a European slave owner'”. Without going into the legal intricacies of the issue, we prepared a comment that, in our opinion, would be indisputably ironic.
Before sharing the results of the experiment, some considerations about irony. Through this rhetorical device, the speaker “pretends to say one thing to say exactly the opposite”, as José Luiz Fiorin teaches us (in Figures of rhetoric, from the publisher Contexto). According to Fiorin, in irony there are “two voices in conflict, one expressing the opposite of what the other said; one voice invalidates what the other says”.
In Machado's example, which we mentioned at the beginning, an uninformed person might believe that the funeral speech was the result of nobler feelings. This voice would say, sincerely, that he was a “good and faithful friend”. In the context of the narrative, however, Brás Cubas' voice invalidates this other voice, inserting elements so that the reader can understand what is between the lines: since the praise is linked to the inheritance received, irony is established.
The problem, for many readers, is that irony is a kind of “unspoken”. The Greek etymology of the term (which came to us via Latin) already suggests this: eirōneia means “the action of questioning while feigning ignorance; dissimulation” (as recorded in the Houaiss Dictionary). It is therefore expected that the reader or listener of the irony will make an inference, that is, resort to contextual elements (intra or extratextual) to access the meaning, to realize that the implicit voice cancels out what was explicitly verbalized. In our experiment, not all readers did so.
“PS.: contains irony”
In the post about the accused nephew (for declaring that his uncle had the “mind of a European slave owner”), we inserted the following comment: “Now you’re going to say that the slave owners were white Europeans? Oh, have mercy!”
With some optimism, we hoped that potential readers would realize that we were denying an obvious fact: that the process of enslavement of black African people was carried out by white Europeans. Added to this is the internal context, the relationship between comment and post: denying the widely documented, known and studied fact that there were European slave owners would be an absurd argument even in times of denialism, incapable of supporting the accusation against the nephew. In short, we sought to create a caricature that would demonstrate the disapproval of the fragile thesis of a supposed “reverse racism”.
Despite all these indications, we received harsh criticism from those who would certainly agree with us, but did not identify the invalidation of the verbalized voice, failing to make the inference required by irony. “Did you miss history classes?”, “If not them, who?”, “Read the book Slavery from Laurentino Gomes and then come back here so you can answer your question yourself” were some of the responses we received.
Among the comments, there was one that left us especially thinking: “People have a lot of trouble with irony… to make it easier, add a PS: contains irony, to help people out.” If we really adopt this resource (which has already been used in posts on social media), perhaps the next step would be to actually include the warning “high in irony” on the covers of the books by the Wizard of Cosme Velho. The idea is not bad: with the warning, no seasoned reader, with access to quality education, would believe that Marcela really loved Brás Cubas throughout those fifteen months and eleven stories…
*Marcelo Modolo is professor of philology at the University of São Paulo (USP).
*Henrique Santos Braga He holds a PhD in Philology and Portuguese Language from USP.
A first version of this article was published in Journal of USP.
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