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The poetics of disengagement: Jane Austen and echoic irony

Massimiliano Morini
Language and Literature 2010 19: 339
DOI: 10.1177/0963947010372955
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Article

The poetics of
disengagement: Jane
Austen and echoic irony

Language and Literature

19(4) 339356
The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0963947010372955
http://lal.sagepub.com

Massimiliano Morini
University of Udine, Italy

Abstract
If it is a truth universally acknowledged that there is irony in Jane Austens novels, there is far
from general agreement as to how that irony works. Most critics hold that there is a gap between
what the novels say and what they mean, but different schools of criticism interpret that gap in
contrasting ways. This article assumes that such critical disagreement arises from the multiplicity
of voices in Austens oeuvre, and more specifically, from the evaluative confusion or indeterminacy
created by what Sperber and Wilson call an echoic use of irony on the narrators part.This article,
however, registers a dissatisfaction with Sperber and Wilsons definition, and proposes to rewrite
echoic irony as perspectival disengagement a more neutral and general term capturing the
narrators ability to subsume other characters voices while at the same time subtly indicating that
their viewpoints are not quite his/her own.

Keywords
disengagement, echoic irony, evaluation, Jane Austen, pragmatics, relevance theory, stylistics

1 Introduction: Jane Austens irony or disengagement?

While all lay and specialized readers seem to agree on the presence of some form or
other of irony in Jane Austens novels, there is great diversity of opinion as to where
irony is, how it works, and against whom or what it is directed. The main identification
problem appears to be posed by Austens third-person extra-diegetic narrators, who
have often been confused for Jane Austen herself in the history of criticism: many of
their evaluations are heard as ironical, but their style is so reticent and their voices are
at times so inextricably entwined with other characters voices that it may be very hard
to tell whether the irony is intended, or whether the ironic evaluation is fully endorsed
by the narrator.

Corresponding author:
Massimiliano Morini, Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Germaniche e Romanze, University of Udine, Italy
Email: massimiliano.morini@uniud.it

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Sperber and Wilsons echoic theory of irony seems ideally suited to describe this
reticent, mimetic form of evaluation: the ironic speaker or, in this case, the ironic narrator
voices thoughts which are not his/her own, while at the same time dissociating [him/
herself] from [them] with anything from mild ridicule to savage scorn (Wilson and
Sperber, 1996 [1992]: 265). This is certainly closer to the heart of Austens narrative
style than any traditional definition of irony as saying one thing and meaning the reverse
or saying one thing and meaning another; but on the other hand, it appears to be at once
too general and too specific. It is too general because certain forms of irony (as other
pragmaticians have observed), in Austen as well as everyday life, are perhaps best
described in non-echoic terms. It is too specific because it presupposes an echoed thought
and anything from mild ridicule to savage scorn while the problem with Austens narrators is that they often appear to be echoing no specific thought, and that no ridicule or
scorn is heard to apprise readers of their real opinions.
In what follows, after discussing (in Section 2) the mechanisms whereby irony is at
once created and veiled by a net of evaluative openness, or evaluative opacity (also
see Morini, 2009: 1536), I propose to rewrite Sperber and Wilsons echoic irony as
perspectival disengagement, and detail (in Section 3) the differences between their
definition and my own. As I will show in connection with Austens narrative language,
the advantages of employing such a concept are twofold: on the one hand, by dispensing
with the term irony, it allows for non-echoic interpretations of irony when an echoic
interpretation would be strained; on the other, it is broad enough to admit for cases in
which no echoed thought can be plausibly imagined, and no ridicule or scorn is heard. At
such times, a more neutral kind of disengagement may still be perceived from a
perspective rather than a thought that the narrator is apparently taking up.

2 Jane Austens ironic indeterminacy

Ever since D.W. Harding offered his deliberately provocative reading of the novels
(Harding, 1998 [1940]: 25), critics have been aware that the traditional view of Jane
Austens inoffensive, unconscious literary craft is no longer tenable. Harding identified
a satirical vein which was obviously a means not of admonition but of self-preservation
(Harding, 1998 [1940]: 12), a safety valve for the authors powerless, marginal, regulated hatred to spurt out from time to time. Later critics, from the 1970s onwards, have
built on Hardings intuitions to create various subversive (and above all feminist)
images of Austen portraits of the author as an undercover ideological terrorist, as the
would-be destroyer of the values she appears to uphold. Other scholars, meanwhile, have
continued to see Austen in a more traditional light (see in particular Butler, 1975;
Duckworth, 1994) but even when her novels are read as paeans for gentrified middle
England, a degree of artistic indirectness is now taken for granted.
All such readings, whether subversive or conservative (the subversive school is currently in power), accept that Austens novels are somehow ironic, either in the narrower
sense of the rhetorical term they say something but mean the reverse or in its wider
application they say something but mean something else, they say something in an
indirect way. Another common element is that both subversive and conservative scholars
tend to read the novels in rigid, simplified ways, as though they were pamphlets with a

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single point to make, or as if they represented the direct expression of their authors
ideological stance (Jane Austen is often invoked, with little or no regard for the poststructuralistic death of the author). The exponents of both schools are in no doubt that
their interpretations are correct, even though the evidence they bring could well be used,
and is actually used, to prove the opposite point as C.L. Johnson has noted, Jane
Austen always seems to inspire radically contradictory appeals to self-evidence
(Johnson, 2001 [1996]: 119). In these readings, irony is normally seen as a strategy
used by the author to press a point home, or conversely, to blunt the edge of her ideological sword:
But although Franks polished art of elegant and witty speaking is generally admired, Jane
Austens subtle irony leaves us with no doubt that it is by no means her ideal. (Berger, 1991: 364)
We can see Austen struggling after Northanger Abbey to combine her implicitly rebellious
vision with an explicitly decorous form [...] (Gilbert and Gubar, 1984 [1979]: 153)

However, once irony is recognized as a presence in Austens novels, it can be quite

difficult to establish where it begins and where it ends, what it is doing there exactly, and
to make sure that it does not end up casting an ironic light on the critic looking for a
simple explanation of irony. Jane Nardin observed as early as 1973 that By assuming
that a certain sort of clever or authoritatively stated narrative comment represents Jane
Austens true intentions [] critics have, in large measure, created the evidences of a
simple, dogmatically endorsed moral code, incompatible with her complex ironic vision
(Nardin, 1973: 10). But even when the ironic vision and the moral code are allowed to be
complex, the search for the real Jane Austen beneath all the layers of indirection inevitably leads to very complex, and indeed contradictory, results. In her 1983 monograph on
parody and irony in Jane Austens novels whose back-cover, in the 2009 reprint, asks
the question But what was Jane Austen really like? Beatrice Battaglia notes that three
images of Jane Austen recur throughout the two centuries of criticism spawned by her
novels. These three images are in open contrast with each other, and yet some sort of
reconciliation, a romantic synthesis of extremes, seems to be the only way of making full
sense of Austens art:
Three seemingly contradictory images recur throughout the history of Austen criticism from
the nineteenth century to the present day: (a) the aimable, dear, placid, modest Jane
Austen who never uttered ... a severe expression [...]; (b) a fully conscious author, seriousminded and didactic; an inflexible moralist who wields irony to damn without forgiveness
and save with no hesitation on the basis of a moral code which subordinates the individual to
the interests of society; (c) an ironical writer who [...] is well aware of the relativity and the
power of the social values threatening to submerge the individual, looking for a compromise
[...] and trying to teach the reader an awareness of self and of the reality surrounding the self
[...] these partial images partially distorted by the pretended exhaustiveness with which each
of them is presented can be reduced to their right proportions if a superimposition is effected
which will define them as different facets of the real Jane Austen. (Battaglia, 2009 [1983]:
16; translation mine)

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Rather than trying to reduce this complexity to a single explanation, a small but
significant line of Austen criticism has investigated the means whereby the complexity
along with its accompanying uncertainty is created. Normally, the answer has been
narratological: there are many voices striving for dominance in the novels, and it is very
difficult to say which voice is sanctioned by the narrator/author/structure, whether the
author is fully backing her narrator, or even whether the narrator is one or many. In 1961,
Wayne C. Booth drew a subtle distinction between Jane Austen and Jane Austen her
dramatized narrative persona in the novels noting that Jane Austen is sometimes unreliable, and yet The dramatic illusion of her presence as a character is as important as any
other element in the story (Booth, 1961: 264, 266). In his famous 1970 essay, Graham
Hough noted that in Austens novels the division of [narrative] labour is by no means
clear, and most of the tale is told in coloured narrative or free indirect style (Hough,
1991 [1970]: 172, 173). In the post-structuralist era, Richard F. Patteson has spoken of a
multiplicity of narrative voice making the readers search for determinacy even more
difficult than the characters (Patteson, 1981: 465). While more recently, but in a very
similar vein, D.A. Miller has imputed this effect of semantic indeterminacy to the disappearance of narrative voice rather than to its multiplication (Miller, 2003: 67, passim).
Each of these narratological and post-structuralist analyses answers a number of questions on how Austens complexity is created, and how the readers search for semantic
determinacy is frustrated: Jane Austen does appear as a (not quite reliable) narratorcharacter in Austens novels; her narrators get mixed up with one or more reflectors; her
narrators are so contradictory that one is tempted to think there is more than one narrative
voice; and finally, her narrators disappear for long stretches of the plot (but they come
back eventually that is where Austen fails as an artist in Millers reading). What these
analyses do not do, however, is answer a number of related why-questions they implicitly
raise: why does the reader need to look for semantic determinacy in Austens novels?
Or, historically put: why does the 20th-century reader need to do that, used as he/she is
to complex narrative machines in which semantic determinacy is abjured from the very
beginning and the author is either dead or absent paring his/her fingernails elsewhere?
More generally: what is this semantic determinacy that the reader is looking for a
simple moral, a central ideology, some explanation of whats going on here? And
historically again whatever semantic determinacy is, why does the reader look for it in
Mansfield Park, but not in Joyces Ulysses, or Woolfs The Waves, or in Carvers editorexcised short stories?
Answering that question means unlocking the complications of Austens oeuvre, and
at the same time understanding why so many interpretations of the novels (interpretations falling into three main categories, according to Beatrice Battaglias list) have been
circulating for two centuries, and why so many readings present themselves as definitive
and authorized. It is my conviction I am afraid I am offering this as an axiom that all
strands of critical opinion are somehow already contained in the literary works that
engender them. In such a view, if most critics tend to offer strong readings of Austens
novels, and if contrasting readings can be seen to be equally rooted in fictional fact, there
must be something in the novels themselves which justifies both the rigid readings and
their unsolvable conflict. In terms of Labovs description of narrative structure, if most
readers are convinced that there is a point to Austens novels, and different points are

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argued for with equal conviction, there must be an element of confusion or of complexity
in the evaluative net of the novels themselves (Labov, 1972: 36696; cf. also Morini,
2009: 1536).
I am of course referring to Labovs term evaluation, and stretching its meaning (with
my own evaluative net) to allow for the multiplicity of voices which is typical of novels. Labovs analysis and structural sequencing of (oral) narratives is so well-known, and
has found such a wide application in stylistics (cf. Fleischman, 1997; Black, 2006:
3943), that no complete recapitulation of its arguments is needed. A single aspect of his
definition of evaluation, however, is particularly interesting for the purposes of this
essay: of all the parts that constitute a narrative, according to Labov, evaluation is at
once the most evasive and the most crucial. It is evasive because it can be found everywhere, and it can be implicit as well as explicit, external as well as embedded and
crucial because it is the point of narrative, the reason why the narrative is told at all, the
tellers attempt to show that his/her story is relevant and so to ward off the listeners So
what rejoinder (Labov, 1972: 366).
The novelist, of course, must stave off the same So what? question besetting the inept
raconteur. When the idea of evaluation is applied to written fiction, however, the absence
of an embodied story-teller highlights its inherently collaborative nature the writer
being absent, it is up to the reader to find evaluative traces within the text in order to
build up his/her own point. In other words, to re-phrase the terms of relevance theory,
each oral or written story carries a presumption of evaluation which leads the listener/
reader to look for its point (Sperber and Wilson, 1996 [1986]: 156). But whereas in oral
narratives the speaker and the listener can both take part in the creation of a relatively
simple point (even So what? can be used by the listener as a point-making question), in
written fiction that presupposed point is often quite complex, because there may be a
number of evaluative sources one or more narrators, some of the characters, the narrated facts themselves striving for the readers attention, and creating the possibility for
different interpretations (Pattesons semantic indeterminacy).
In other words, the point of a written narrative remains the product of an interaction
between sender and receiver, but the process is complicated by the presence of a number
of middle-ground evaluative figures. A further complication arises from the different
degrees of credibility assigned by the author and/or the reader to each of these brokers of
evaluation: in each story or novel, different characters/narrators may be intended by the
author/seen by the reader to be more or less sympathized with/sympathetic. Such a confusion of evaluative voices makes it very risky to read most short stories and novels as if
they were pamphlets (unless the form is used for an overtly polemical purpose, and the
final result does not surpass the initial intention).
These complications upon complications might tempt us to abandon the whole idea of
fictional evaluation as paradoxically pointless, were it not that there are certain regularities governing the distribution of evaluative authority in fiction. If each written story
as written by each reader possesses its own evaluative web, it is also true that certain
fictional figures are normally expected to have more evaluative authority than others.
The protagonist of a story or a novel is normally liked (and therefore believed, and followed in his/her judgments) by the reader, unless he/she finds that character particularly
unsympathetic. If a character is used as a reflector, the reader finds it easier to identify

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with him/her and share his/her opinions of facts and people. Most crucially, the narrator
is structurally perceived by the reader to display more evaluative authority than any
other mediating figure. The narrator carries some of or all the credibility attaching to the
teller in oral narrative, and is therefore often confused with the author. Even intra-diegetic
first-person narrators (i.e. first-person narrators who take part in the action) are seen as
more authoritative than anybody else that is why Joseph Conrad chose unreliable firstperson narrators to frustrate readers expectations. But the most structurally authoritative figure in written fiction is certainly the third-person extra-diegetic narrator a
character who is not presented as a character, an external godlike figure whose judgments are almost automatically believed. In the coda of Mansfield Park, this godlike
figure takes charge of the narrative, informs the reader about further developments, dispenses rewards and punishments according to conduct:
Mr. Rushworth had no difficulty in procuring a divorce; and so ended a marriage contracted
under such circumstances as to make any better end, the effect of good luck, not to be reckoned
on. She had despised him, and loved another and he had been very much aware that it was so.
The indignities of stupidity, and the disappointments of selfish passion, can excite little pity. His
punishment followed his conduct, as did a deeper punishment, the deeper guilt of his wife. He
was released from the engagement to be mortified and unhappy, till some other pretty girl could
attract him into matrimony again, and he might set forward on a second, and it is to be hoped,
more prosperous trial of the state if duped, to be duped at least with good humour and good
luck; while she must withdraw with infinitely stronger feelings to a retirement and reproach,
which could allow no second spring of hope or character. (Austen, 2003 [1814]: 3645)

These are very open evaluations, offered by an external narrator who knows what happened and why, and manifests no doubt as to psychological motives or ethical positions.
Being offered by such an authoritative figure, these judgements tend to be accepted by
simple, literal readers, who are therefore convinced that Mansfield Park can be read as a
critique of new urban manners and an apology of old countrified values (cf. Mudrick,
1952: 155). However, there is a problem with this kind of reading, just as there is a problem with the view of Austens narrators as completely detached from their fictions. As
Irvin Ehrenpreis has written, with the usual confusion between Jane Austen and Jane
Austen, By sounding blunt and outspoken in many of her judgments, Austen entices
unwary readers into assuming that she is straightforward [...] But it remains true that
when Austen does plainly set forth her judgment, it is [...] quite reliable (Ehrenpreis,
1980: 118). If one substitutes Jane Austen with her narrators, and looks at the unfolding
of narrative discourse in the novels, one understands how a net of evaluative opacity (or
semantic indeterminacy) is created which baffles most readers or entices them into
thinking that they know what Austen is about or what Mansfield Park is about. Austen
employs third-person extra-diegetic narrators, who are implicitly held to be more reliable
than anyone else within a fictional structure: plus, as seen earlier, these narrators are
sometimes quite outspoken in their judgments. But when they are not outspoken, when
they do not speak out, these narrators deny or undermine their own authority in various
ways or alternatively, it is the narrative structure as a whole that denies or undermines
that authority. In Jane Austens Narrative Techniques, I observe five main strategies

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whereby the narrators authority is withheld or discredited (Morini, 2009: 2735): (1) the
narrators voice, though sometimes loud, is not heard at all for long stretches, thus leaving room for other evaluative positions; (2) the narrator sometimes evaluates events and
characters in a weak, reticent manner; (3) the narrator occasionally appears in his/her
own person, thus becoming a normal character for a while; (4) the narrator hides behind
a reflector, sometimes so mimetically that there is no distinguishing his/her evaluations
from the central characters; and (5) the narrator ventriloquizes all sorts of characters.
The contrast between the centripetal structure of third-person narration and the centrifugal strategies of narrative withholding explains why most readers have seen a simple,
rigid point in the novels, and why there is no general agreement on what that simple point
is. The kind of narration employed by Austen encourages readers to look for a point
which is there, then not quite there, then not there at all: instead of looking at the process
whereby such uncertainty is created, most critics tend to write it out of existence by turning a weak point into a strong one.
Of the five strategies just outlined, (1), (2) and (3) are relatively easy to spot and follow, while (4) and (5), just like evaluation, are subtler and more pervasive. It is often
hard to distinguish who is speaking when the narrator hides behind a mimetic reflector,
or when he/she describes something in the words someone else might have used. From
the point of view of evaluation, readers are hard put to establish the narrators degree of
involvement in what he/she is voicing.1 Austens use of free indirect speech and reflector narrative, of course, has often been praised as being much in advance of her time:
what has been described less often and in less detail is her narrators chameleonic2
ability to ventriloquize all sorts of characters, to speak in anybodys voice without giving clear indications as to his/her endorsement of their points of view, or even as to
whose voice it is that he/she is imitating. The initial orientation of Mansfield Park (the
same novel whose strongly evaluative narrator damns all villains just before the close)
provides several illustrations of this ability. Three sisters (Maria Ward/Lady Bertram,
Miss Ward/Mrs Norris, and Fanny Ward/Mrs Price) marry husbands occupying three
different social positions:
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon [...] had the good luck to captivate Sir
Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park [...] All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the
match [...] Miss Wards match, indeed, when it came to the point, was not contemptible [...] and
Mr. and Mrs. Norris began their career of conjugal felicity with very little less than a thousand
a year [...] Lady Bertram, who was a woman of very tranquil feelings, and a temper remarkably
easy and indolent, would have contented herself with merely giving up her sister, and thinking
no more of the matter; but Mrs. Norris had a spirit of activity, which could not be satisfied till
she had written a long and angry letter to Fanny, to point out the folly of her conduct, and
threaten her with all its possible ill consequences. (Austen, 2003 [1814]: 34; italics mine)

This condensed matrimonial history opens the novel and sets the scene for Fanny
Prices arrival at Mansfield Park, her uncles hereditary abode. Of the three sisters, one
marries very well (she captivates Sir Thomas Bertram, thus becoming Lady Bertram),
one marries not contemptibly (the eldest Miss Ward found herself obliged to be
attached to the Rev. Mr. Norris), and one marries badly (Fanny Ward chooses Mr Price,

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a Lieutenant of Marines with a fondness for drink). As a result of this disparity, and of
Sir Thomas distance from the Prices situation in life, a breach is created which is only
healed when Mrs Price, in her financial desperation, swallows up her pride and asks for
her relatives help a help which is given in the form of adoption.
What is remarkable about this very condensed beginning is the quantity of information about the characters (not only about their financial situation, but also about their
temper and disposition) that readers are given without the narrator ever committing him/
herself to an opinion. In other words, readers may feel that there are several points to
this small chronicle they feel that characters are being evaluated as well as described
yet none of those points and evaluations are made explicitly, or maybe none of them are
made in the narrators voice. There is a clear effect of ventriloquism, for instance, in All
Huntingdon exclaimed about the greatness of the match, which conveys the idea that the
match was an unequal one, and that it spread wonder and envy in the Wards native town.
The passage conveys those ideas, but it does not voice them: those ideas are made evident
to us by the narrators assumption of a Huntingdon point of view,3 from which the
disparity of fortune is obvious and the envy silenced, but somehow still implicit in that
censored exclaimed. The effect of vocal appropriation, of speaking from an external
point of view, is perhaps less evident in the other passages I have italicized: but these
apparently neutral descriptions can only be reconciled with the narrators sagacity or
ferocity in other parts of the novel (as well as with the ferocious facts which illustrate the
descriptions at this stage) if one assumes that the narrator is speaking with tongue in
cheek. But speaking with tongue in cheek can be characterized as speaking in someone
elses voice, taking up someone elses point of view this someone else being in this
case a very commonplace person with a simplistic outlook on things. Only a person of
this kind and surely not Jane Austen, or Jane Austen, or Jane Austens narrator in his/
her outspoken moments can see Mr and Mrs Norris loveless alliance as a career of
conjugal felicity, Lady Bertrams savage torpor as a temper remarkably easy (indolent might represent the outspoken narrators point of view), and Mrs Norris envious
righteousness as a spirit of activity.
Readers evaluations of this passage will vary according to the degree of distance they
feel between what the narrator says and what he/she thinks. If the comments I have italicized are seen as belonging to the narrator, the passage will be read as lamenting or
condemning Fanny Wards imprudence; if, on the contrary, they are seen as voiced but
not endorsed by the narrator, it will be read as a critique of family prejudices, or a condemnation of the other two sisters. Both readings are possible, but neither is true or
authorized: by endowing her narrator with a ventriloquists technique, Austen managed
not to commit him/her to any single opinion.
It will now be apparent that if there is irony in Austens fictional constructions, it is
not merely there in the traditional rhetorical sense though irony as inversion is also
present in the novels, as will be seen. A much subtler, much more pervasive kind of
irony creates a Bakhtinian dialogue (cf. Bakhtin, 1981 [19341941]) between the narrators and other voices, and Austens chameleonic ability often leaves us in doubt as to
whether the narrator is speaking in his/her own voice or someone elses, expressing her
own or an external point of view. In other words, if there is irony, it must be something
akin to Wilson and Sperbers echoic irony the narrator mentioning rather than

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using the words he/she is speaking: The speaker echoes a thought [he/she] attributes to
someone else, while dissociating [him/herself] from it with anything from mild ridicule
to savage scorn (Wilson and Sperber, 1996 [1992]: 265).
This definition is certainly relevant to a discussion of Austens ventriloquizing techniques, but it also poses two problems in connection with such echoic passages as the
beginning of Mansfield Park quoted earlier. On the one hand, it is difficult to say that the
narrator is echoing actual thoughts one could perhaps say that he/she is making them
up as if they belonged to someone else, as imitators do. On the other hand, there seems
to be no ridicule or scorn involved here, or if there is, the narrator manages to hide all
its outward signs. In order to solve these two problems, I propose the alternative term
perspectival disengagement or, more simply, disengagement and rewrite Wilson
and Sperbers definition as follows: The speaker voices an opinion from a point of view
which is not his/her own, while at the same time dissociating him/herself with various
degrees of explicitness.
In the passage quoted above, the element of dissociation is almost imperceptible, and
it is only felt as a discrepancy between fact and description, or between this description
and other descriptions offered by the narrator in the course of the novel. In many other
cases, the effect of perspectival disengagement may be totally explicit. When it is
explicit, disengagement is usually felt as irony (Hes fixing it, we might say of somebody who said he would fix something and is now making a mess of it all). When it is
more implicit, it may be felt as euphemism (Mrs. Norris had a spirit of activity, which
could not be satisfied till she had written a long and angry letter to Fanny). But whatever
the traditional rhetorical names for them, these effects are produced by the same chameleonic disposition of the speaker which had best be called by a single name.

3 Echoic irony revised: disengagement

The idea of echoic irony has a short history of its own. Sperber and Wilson first formulated their definition in a 1981 article, then included it within their general theory of
relevance in 1986, and went on revising it until the definition reached a provisionally
definitive form in a 1992 essay. After 1992, their intuitions have been taken up and
expanded by a number of scholars working on humour (most notably Curc, in her articles of 1995 and 1996), while their general validity has been questioned by pragmaticians (Hamamoto, 1998; Seto, 1998; Yamanashi, 1998) and stylisticians (Toolan, 1996:
20722; Simpson, 2003), some of whose objections are repeated in this article. Sperber
and Wilson themselves answered some of the questions raised by their definitions in
1998, though their response, rather predictably, was to come back to their original formulations and exemplifications.4
The inception of Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction (Sperber and Wilson, 1981)
is the realization that neither traditional rhetoric nor Grices theory of implicature (1991
[1967]) are able to account for the existence of certain types of irony which involve
repetition-with-variation of someone elses discourse, rather than simple inversion. To
take one of the examples quoted in the article, when Darcy repeats Elizabeths comment
on Wickhams misfortunes in Pride and Prejudice (His misfortunes! repeated Darcy
contemptuously, yes, his misfortunes have been great indeed), he does so with a twist

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which makes it clear that he is mentioning rather than using those two words (His
misfortunes!), and expressing his opinion on the echoed proposition. Where traditional
rhetoric would define Darcys procedure as one of semantic inversion, Sperber and
Wilson insist that it is Darcys echoic use of irony which triggers the listeners/readers
ironic interpretation. And while in this case the echoed words immediately precede the
echo, there are cases in which no actual precedent is needed:
Some are immediate echoes, and others delayed; some have their source in actual utterances,
others in thoughts or opinions; some have a real source, others an imagined one; some are
traceable back to a particular individual, whereas others have a vaguer origin. When the echoic
character of the utterance is not immediately obvious, it is nevertheless suggested. (Sperber
and Wilson, 1981: 30910)

Sperber and Wilsons definition of echoic irony has the advantage of psychological
cogency, at least for all those cases in which a real or imagined source is clearly echoed
by a speaker/writer. The final example given in Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction
clinches the argument to perfection: when Mark Antony says six times that Brutus is an
honourable man (in Act 3 Scene 2 of Julius Caesar), it becomes clearer and clearer that
he is only mentioning a popular opinion in order to place it in the context of further facts
which make it clear that he is dissociating himself from it (Sperber and Wilson, 1981:
315). I will come back to this example, and to the earlier-quoted incipit of Mansfield
Park, when I explain why I prefer disengagement to irony, within my revision of
Sperber and Wilsons theory.
The main problem with echoic irony, however, is that notwithstanding their own
initial qualifications, Sperber and Wilson soon become so enraptured with the concept
that they want to extend it to all types of irony. At the start of their 1981 article, they caution us that the existence of a unified category of irony should not be taken for granted
(Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 298). But before the close, the idea that there may be two
distinct types of irony: echoic irony [...] and standard irony, whose interpretation
involves a recovery of its figurative meaning (Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 309) is mentioned only to be immediately rejected. The authors proceed to include all varieties of
irony within the echoic frame the only differences among seemingly disparate instances
being made by the physical/psychological distance between source and echo or by the
traceability or vagueness of the source (cf. the excerpt just quoted, pp. 30910). In their
1992 re-elaboration of their theses, Wilson and Sperber further extend the comprehensiveness of echoic utterances and irony by defining them not as literal interpretations
(i.e. mentions) of an attributed thought or utterance, but simply as interpretations, literal
or non-literal, of an attributed thought or utterance (Wilson and Sperber, 1996 [1992]:
270). The definition has by now become so wide that it is virtually possible to define any
ironic utterance as echoic which is exactly what Sperber and Wilson do in order to
prove their all-inclusive point.
Sperber and Wilsons argumentation is so cogent that it tends to obscure the flaws in
their logic: for instance, both the 1981 and the 1992 articles mix unquestionable cases of
echoic irony with other examples which force the authors to great exertions in order to
prove that an echoic interpretation is available and, indeed, preferable. And for the sake

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of argumentative progression, the unquestionable cases are always preceded by the

questionable ones:
For example, suppose we ask an informant whether (1) or (2) could be ironical when said by
someone caught in a downpour:
(1) What lovely weather.
(2) It seems to be raining. (Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 297)
We come upon a customer complaining in a shop, blind with rage and making a public exhibition
of himself. I turn to you and say:
(1) You can tell hes upset. (Wilson and Sperber, 1996 [1992]: 261)

While it is perhaps significant that the 1992 example the purpose of which is to
demonstrate the fallacy of the view of irony as meaning the opposite of what one says is
never taken up in the rest of the article, What lovely weather and It seems to be raining
are both provided with echoic explanations. In the first case, a hypothetical previous
context is created in which someone (perhaps the speaker himself) had expressed their
hopes that the weather would be lovely in which case the speakers intention in (1)
would be to indicate, for example, that it had been ridiculous to hope that the weather
would be lovely (Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 301). In the second, the speakers irony is
aimed at a hypothetical person with incredibly slow reactions who could make such a
remark (Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 302).
The problem with these exercises in logical linguistics is not that it is impossible
to find contexts in which every ironic utterance becomes echoic, but that it is possible
to think of contexts in which certain utterances are ironical but not echoic. This problem does not arise from the definition of echoic irony, but from the authors insistence that their definition subsume all previously recognized forms of irony an
insistence which goes against the grain of their own initial intuitions. At the start of
their 1981 article, Sperber and Wilson claim that linguistics [...] is a branch of cognitive psychology (Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 297), and go on to demonstrate the cognitive evidence for the existence of the linguistic concept they baptize. Yet, once the
dogma of irony as echoic mention is formulated, and all ironic utterances are consequently constructed as echoic, contexts have to be provided even for those instances
in which the echoic interpretation appears unconvincing on the cognitive plane: to
quote Paul Simpson, some anterior discourse event has to be invented, come hell or
high water [...] that imagined echoed utterance then becomes quietly actualized and
reified into the explanation as a previous statement or a mutually shared belief
(Simpson, 2003: 116). When the echoic interpretation is plausible and the echoic context available, Sperber and Wilsons theory does a good service to our understanding
of linguistic practice; when the echoic interpretation is strained and the echoic context sounds contrived, linguistic practice appears to be enlisted in the service of
Sperber and Wilsons theory.
Intuitively, on the cognitive plane, humans do not construct or interpret all the utterances that are normally interpreted ironically as echoic mentions of a prior (real, imagined, constructed) discourse. A typical example is traditional inverting irony, which is

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quite often not of the echoic type either in the senders intention or in the listeners
interpretation. In a paper read at a 1993 conference on relevance theory, Ken-Ichi Seto
has pointed out that if I say Well, I like that! when I obviously do not like that, my utterance is ironic even if it does not echo any prior utterance (Seto, 1998: 243). Within the
same symposium on irony, Sperber and Wilson have dismissed such cases as relatively fixed expressions whose ironical interpretations have become grammaticalized
to such an extent that it is hard to imagine these utterances communicating more regular
literal meanings (Sperber and Wilson, 1998: 286). However, the fact that certain conversational implicatures of this kind can become conventional implicatures demonstrates
nothing but the productivity of the communicative/inferential process. Inverting, nonechoic irony is used continually in everyday conversation (one need only think of someone saying What lovely weather in a downpour, as opposed to saying it when the
weather is indeed lovely) as well as in fiction, as is shown by another passage from
Mansfield Park:
[The Bertram sisters] could not but hold [Fanny Price] cheap on finding that she had but two
sashes, and had never learned French; and when they perceived her to be little struck with the
duet they were so good as to play, they could do no more than make her a generous present of
some of their least valued toys, and leave her to herself, while they adjourned to whatever
might be the favourite holiday sport of the moment, making artificial flowers or wasting gold
paper. (Austen, 2003 [1814]: 1112)

There is undoubtedly something echoic (or perspectival, in the broader sense I am trying to define) at the beginning of this passage from Chapter Two of Mansfield Park
(They could not but hold her cheap [] the duet they were so good as to play); but at
the end the narrator commits him/herself to a couple of assertions which are best analysed as cases of non-echoic irony. When the narrator says generous, we know that he/
she means not as generous as one might wish, and when he/she says holiday sport,
we know he/she means waste of time, or at the very least that he/she intends to charge
an apparently harmless expression with a negative connotation. We know all that
because Maria and Julia Bertrams generosity produces a present of some of their least
valued toys, and because one of the two holiday sports attributed to the sisters is wasting gold paper. In the terms of Curcs theory of humour (which is based on echoic
irony and relevance theory at large), an incongruity is created between the propositional forms of two manifest assumptions (Curc, 1995: 29), and that incongruity can
only be solved through an ironic reading. However, there is no need here to read one of
the two incongruous propositions as a belief attributed to someone other than the
speaker or to the speaker at another time (Curc, 1995: 38). While the echoic interpretation is immediate and fruitful for some of Curcs examples (Oscar Wildes assertion
that There is something tragic about the number of young men [...] who start life with
a perfect profile and end up by adopting some useful profession is a patent subversion
of a popular commonplace), it would be strained for cases like the foregoing. The stylistician would be forced to think of the narrator quoting him/herself as a hypothetical
person with incredibly slow reactions, a rather complicated way of cracking a very
simple code.

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However, even the echoic passages quoted earlier, just like the echoic excerpts
from Chapter One of Mansfield Park, pose problems for Sperber and Wilsons definition
of irony or Curcs definition of humour, for that matter. For while there is clearly
something of the ventriloquist in Austens descriptions, and it is easy enough to understand whom the narrator is imitating, it is very hard to imagine what he/she is imitating
what is the real or imagined utterance he/she is echoing in They could not but hold her
cheap and the duet they were so good as to play. The difficulty is easily solved if one
thinks of the imitator as someone who may occasionally repeat someone elses words,
but more generally speaks as if he/she were someone else (certain comedians manage to
conjure up their real-life model without ever quoting a single word they say). In Austens
case, one had better say that the narrator is not actually quoting a real or imagined precedent (though that is also possible, of course, as a special case), but speaking from someone elses point of view, in a spirit of perspectival imitation.5
In other words, perspectival disengagement widens the scope of Sperber and
Wilsons echoic irony and it does so not only in terms of what is imitated, but also
in terms of the attitude conveyed by the imitation. For if perspectival is designed to
dispense the linguist and the stylistician from finding or contriving a prior echoed
thought or utterance, disengagement is designed to cover all cases in which something
less than the mild ridicule or savage scorn required by Sperber and Wilsons definition
is involved. One need only go back to the examples from Mansfield Park. While mild
ridicule (or controlled indignation) is probably correct as a description of the narrators
attitude to Maria and Julias viewpoint, a more neutral form of detachment marks off the
distance between the narrator and the viewpoints he/she assumes in Chapter One. When
the initial orientation of the novel is given, the distance between the narrators and the
external viewpoint is so slight and subtle that one can assume that there is no distance at
all: one is only led to assume an external viewpoint, perspectivally imitated, so as to
make sense of the incongruity between what the narrator appears to say here and what
he/she says later. If this is irony, it is irony in a subtler sense, as in Ducrots theory of
enunciation (Ducrot, 1984: 21011) presented in English by Marnette (2001: 246): what
makes an utterance ironic is not that it mentions an absurd point of view, but, rather, that
it subtly blends that point of view within the utterance of the speaker (i.e. the locutor)
without him being equated with its origin (i.e. its enunciator). But then again, even
Ducrots version of irony is unsatisfactory if universally applied: for sometimes the
enunciators point of view is subtly blended with the locutors, and sometimes the locutor takes pains to make a clear-cut distinction.
In Ducrots as well as in Sperber and Wilsons definitions, the problem is with the
term irony, which has a long history of its own and cannot be easily made to account
for a newly discovered class of phenomena. One can voice an external point of view in
various ways, not all of them compatible with standard notions of irony sometimes a
hearer/reader will perceive sarcasm (only a heavy-handed form of irony?), or parody, or
satire, sometimes a subtler form of detachment.6 When Austens narrator tells us that All
Huntingdon exclaimed upon the match we may feel that two points of view are united
in one voice somehow blended, perhaps not quite. When Mark Antony says that Brutus
is an honourable man, his hearers and Shakespeares audience/readers may initially perceive that proposition as expressing his own point of view, but the initial impression is

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disproved when he reiterates the proposition in the context of further facts which make
it clear that he is dissociating himself (Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 315) from the point of
view he is voicing, in a gradual escalation from detachment to irony to open, indignant
sarcasm. When Sperber and Wilson classify certain interpretations as ironical between
inverted commas (see earlier; Sperber and Wilson, 1998: 286), they are quoting widespread assumptions about irony, expressing their detachment from those assumptions,
yet not quite being ironical about them.
In order to cover all these cases, including those in which mild ridicule or savage
scorn is effectively involved, I propose to use the term disengagement, as being more
neutral and less charged with accrued meaning than irony. Carmen Curc herself, in
another article on echoic humour, speaks of disengagement for the attitude of speakers [who] lead hearers to entertain mental representations that are attributable to someone other than the speaker at the time of the current utterance, while simultaneously
expressing towards such representations an attitude of self-distancing (Curc, 1996:
89); but her use of the term is rather occasional, and once again conditioned by the limited spectrum of utterances she takes into consideration. Much as I appreciate Curcs
formulation, therefore, my definition of perspectival disengagement owes more to
Martin and Whites proposal of engagement as a cover-term for all the dialogical,
explicit or implicit ways in which speakers/writers refer to prior judgments while
expressing judgments of their own:
we are interested in the degree to which speakers/writers acknowledge these prior speakers and
in the ways in which they engage with them. We are interested in whether they present themselves as standing with, as standing against, as undecided, or as neutral with respect to these
other speakers and their value positions. (Martin and White, 2005: 93)

My disengagement differs from Martin and Whites engagement in emphasis and in

scope. On the one hand, while Martin and White are interested in language as appraisal/
evaluation, and therefore insist on the value positions blended or contrasted by means
of engagement, I am only interested in how a conflation/conflict of engaging points of
view can be created (though it can very well be argued, as Stubbs does in a passage
which Martin and White quote approvingly, that whenever speakers (or writers) say
anything, they encode their point of view towards it; Martin and White, 2005: 92). On
the other hand, and more specifically, perspectival disengagement can be seen as a
special case of implicit engagement a strategy for engaging with an external point of
view which involves assuming that point of view within ones own voice, while at the
same time signalling, more or less explicitly, that ones point of view and the point of
view one is voicing are not exactly, not necessarily, or not at all the same.

4 Conclusion: How and why

Linguists create theories to account for how language works, rather than why it works
like that. Nevertheless, a number of why-questions are always hidden in or raised by any
linguistic theory. When Sperber and Wilson have to explain how echoic irony works,

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they are faced with the following question: Why should humans use irony at all? Or, as
they themselves put it: how are [the] attitudes and impressions [conveyed by irony] to
be dealt with in a theory of communication? (Wilson and Sperber, 1996 [1992]: 274). In
their 1992 article, the answer seems to be that by using irony, speakers can communicate
a number of weak implicatures besides the strong, mutually manifest assumptions conveyed by their utterances. More prosaically, in Irony and the Use-Mention Distinction,
they specify that echoic irony is used in order to communicate a belief about [ones]
utterance, rather than by means of it (Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 302). Since the utterance is attributed to someone else, using irony involves creating weak offensive implicatures against a victim the real or imagined source of the echoed utterance:
The analysis of irony as a type of mention thus makes it possible to predict which ironical
utterances will have a particular victim, and who that victim will be. When the utterance or
opinion echoed has no specific originator, there will be no victim; when there is a specific,
recognizable originator, he will be the victim; when the speaker echoes himself, the irony will
be self-directed; when he echoes his hearer, the result will be sarcasm. (Sperber and Wilson,
1981: 314)

Once again, this sounds a bit mechanical and simplistic even for echoic irony, not to
mention disengagement at large. At the beginning of Mansfield Park, external points of
view are more or less recognizable beneath the narrators voice, yet it would be too much
to say that it is these voices that are targeted by the narrator (when Mrs Norris is pronounced to have a spirit of activity, the voice can be heard as a popular one, but the
target, if there is a target, is Mrs Norris herself). An attitude of disengagement, even
when it is distinctly ironical, can be adopted for all sorts of purposes. As is probably the
case with Austens narrator who, one should not forget, would tend to be identified with
the author by contemporary readers speakers can simply adopt perspectives which are
not their own for social-mimetic purposes, and at the same time they may wish to retain
a certain degree of disengaged freedom from those very perspectives. Or they may even
enjoy speaking from an external point of view as Darcy reminds us in a passage from
Pride and Prejudice already quoted by Wilson and Sperber (1996 [1992]: 267):
I shall not say that you are mistaken, he replied, because you could not really believe me to
entertain any design of alarming you; and I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long
enough to know, that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in
fact are not your own.
Elizabeth laughed heartily at this picture of herself, and said to Colonel Fitzwilliam, Your
cousin will give you a very pretty notion of me, and teach you not to believe a word I say. I
am particularly unlucky in meeting with a person so well able to expose my real character, in
a part of the world, where I had hoped to pass myself off with some degree of credit. Indeed,
Mr. Darcy, it is very ungenerous in you to mention all that you knew to my disadvantage in
Hertfordshire and, give me leave to say, very impolitic too for it is provoking me to retaliate, and such things may come out, as will shock your relations to hear. (Austen, 2004 [1813]: 134)

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As she demonstrates elsewhere, Elizabeth is indeed capable of speaking with an attitude

of perspectival disengagement she inherited from her father but in this particular case,
is her reply ironical? Not in Sperber and Wilsons sense of the term unless, again, a
very strained reading is given whereby Elizabeth is echoing thoughts she attributes to
Darcy. Nonetheless, I am convinced that many lay and specialized readers would be
tempted to include irony in Elizabeths conversational style, even at this particular
juncture. When Elizabeth speaks of her present surroundings as a part of the world,
where [she] had hoped to pass myself off with some degree of credit, one does not need
to think of a real or imagined antecedent to conclude that she is being ironic because
she is being ironic at her own expense, she is mocking herself, and she is doing so by
voicing thoughts and assuming a perspective which are (probably) entirely her own.
Notes
1 Compare some recent studies in cognitive stylistics (Sotirova, 2006; Bray, 2007) on how
different readers interpret the dual voice (Pascal, 1977) of free indirect discourse differently
some of them hear it as the narrators, some as the characters, some others as dual with
significant variations on the age and stylistic education clines.
2 The adjective was first used by Mary Lascelles, who wrote as early as 1937 that In Mansfield
Park Jane Austens style develops a new faculty, out of one perceptible in all her novels a
faculty I can only describe as chameleon-like ... [The] habits of expression of the characters
impress themselves on the narrative style of the episodes in which they are involved, and on the
description of their situations (Lascelles 1937: 767).
3 For a narratological discussion of how characters (and characters minds) are created socially
in novels, see Palmer (2004), above all chapter 7.
4 More recently, Wilson has revisited traditional theories of irony alongside the echoic and
pretence accounts (pretence is partly relevant to my own definition of perspectival
disengagement): while conceding that certain parodic forms of irony can indeed be seen
as involving pretence or simulation, Wilson has reiterated her point that prototypical cases of
irony [...] involve echoic use without any element of pretence (Wilson, 2009: 210).
5 Of course, the whole idea of speaking as if one were someone else is at least implicit in Sperber
and Wilsons theory (cf. the cases in which echoic irony is directed at a hypothetical person
with incredibly slow reactions; Sperber and Wilson, 1981: 302). In this case, the problem is
with the term echoic, which forces the linguist to find or imagine a prior utterance. I solve
the problem by redefining echoic as perspectival, and by treating echoic cases as a subset
of perspectival imitations. In this, my approach resembles Curries pretence account of irony,
which has the ironist pretending to have a limited or otherwise defective perspective, point of
view or stance, F (Currie, 2006: 118).
6 In her recent article on Irony and metarepresentation, Wilson herself explains that the
attitudes that can be conveyed in an echoic utterance range from acceptance and endorsement
of the attributed thought through various shades of doubt or scepticism or outright rejection,
but then goes on to define the particular dissociative attitudes which are characteristic of
verbal irony (Wilson, 2009: 2023).

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Address
Massimiliano Morini, Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Germaniche e Romanze, Via
Mantica 3, Udine 33100, Italy. [email: massimiliano.morini@uniud.it]

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