SOURCE: "Critical Views on Irony in the Fables," in Patterns of Irony in the "Fables" of La Fontaine, pp. 1-30. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.

Numerous critics have been aware that irony is a striking and even dominant aspect of La Fontaine's manner in the Fables. Several meanings have been ascribed, however, to the ironic vision ostensibly expressed in this poetry, and one is reminded of Wayne C. Booth's remark that "irony has come to stand for so many things that we are in danger of losing it as a useful term altogether."¹ Happily this confused state of affairs did not prevent Booth from proceeding to write an original and important study of irony that will figure prominently in the next chapter.

Virtually everyone dealing with irony in literature would probably start by saying that it involves a conflict between what seems to be real and what is real. In other words, though it is doubtful that any two readers could ever reach complete agreement as to the meaning of irony in all its manifestations, one might well approach unanimous accord by contending that the ironic mode is always characterized by tension resulting from the contradiction of appearance by reality. But then it becomes necessary to define appearance and reality. Do these terms relate to truth and illusion in intrinsic literary contexts or can the concepts of what is real and what is apparent correspond to historical situations and events as well? On such points consensus has not been attained by scholars writing about irony in the Fables of La Fontaine.

The first scholar to examine Lafontainian irony, as such, in some detail was Odette de Mourgues. Organizing her material according to the Horatian principle of utile dulci (which became the formula instruire et plaire in French neo-classical theory), she devoted a chapter of her elegant study, O Muse fuyante proie, to "l'ironie poétique" of La Fontaine, a subdivision in her view of the concept plaire.² She approaches the topic by focusing on a certain quality that

implique de la part du poète la faculté de percevoir et d'exprimer un écart, un désaccord, entre, d'une part, le langage poétique dont il use et, de I'autre, la réalité qu'il suggère, si bien que le poème nous donnera nécessairement une vision double et contrastée des choses. L'attitude du poète à l'égard du désaccord qu'il exprime varie suivant les cas: elle peut n'être que simple amusement, ou au contraire indiquer une très sérieuse préoccupation.

(O Muse fiuyante proie, p. 132)

She says that the French language lacks a term to identify this quality, whereas English literary critics, T. S. Eliot in particular, describe it as wit. This is the quality that she will call "ironie poétique." She continues by declaring that this quality is not restricted to any country or period and that it can appear in various forms. Though it might be useful to distinguish between irony and wit, for the present purposes it will suffice to assume that Odette de Mourgues's "ironie poétique" is the equivalent of the English term (poetic) irony.

Few would quarrel with the main idea conveyed in the foregoing definition: namely, that irony is generated by a contrast between what is said and what is intended, between the surface meaning of poetic language and an underlying reality that contradicts it. However, this definition leaves a number of questions unanswered. Is the locus of the correcting reality always in the text or may it be sought elsewhere? Does the poet's "vision double et contrastée des choses" destroy the surface meaning, or can it coexist with the reality that it implies? On what grounds will the reader decide whether the poet is addressing his subject with an amused or serious attitude? If the range of potential authorial stances is so broad, why, as de Mourgues maintains, is a writer unable to express poetic irony in more than a single tone? Are the attitudes the artist conveys those of the biographical author or of a literary persona (or both), and how can the reader know?

After relating her explanation of "ironie poétique" to the poetry of the précieux ("Toute poésie précieuse est, par définition, basée sur un désaccord, sur la rupture délibérée qu'établit le précieux entre l'univers conventionnel et rassurant de la société précieuse et le monde de la vie réelle," p. 132), de Mourgues indicates how the irony contained by such poetry differs from that of La Fontaine:

Alors que dans le poème précieux, l'ironie poétique ne se sert de la réalité que pour faire ressortir encore plus toute la frivolité du contenu, La Fontaine se servira d'une apparente frivolité pour mettre en relief la réalité qu'il dépeint. Le poète précieux ne veut qu'amuser. Pour la Muse des Fables plaire et instruire sont inséparables.

(pp. 135-36)

Not many readers would be likely to confuse a typical poem by La Fontaine with a piece by Benserade or Voiture, but it is hard to imagine how the level of frivolité, apparent or otherwise, could serve as a workable distinguishing factor. The reconstructed réalité of an ironic fable of La Fontaine is not necessarily more instructive than its superficial meaning, nor is the surface of such a poem inevitably frivolous. And does the "apparente frivolité" apply to the viewpoint of the reader, that of the author, the narrator, or one or more characters? Finally, the poet's official pronouncements aside, do we have the impression when reading the Fables that much instruction is really being accomplished? Even if so (as Odette de Mourgues undertakes to demonstrate in her chapter entitled "Instruire," pp. 83-100), how are we to determine whether instruire is an integral part of La Fontaine's "ironie poétique" or an accompaniment that does not in itself contribute to the definition? De Mourgues offers a partial answer to this last question when she asserts, "L'ironie poétique sera pour La Fontaine, en même temps qu'un element de charme, un instrument pour explorer son univers de moraliste" (p. 136), but one is left wondering precisely how the lesson-giver does the bidding of the ironist (or maybe the other way around).

After having discussed the poetic irony in a celebrated passage from Adonis ("Rien ne manque a Vénus …"), de Mourgues proceeds to discuss what she terms the same type of irony in the fable "Les Deux Pigeons."³ In her judgment this is indeed a pervasive quality:

Cette ironie poétique est présente partout dans les Fables. C'est en elle que nous percevons, comme étant inséparables, les deux sourires du moraliste: celui de l'intelligence et celui de la tendresse. C'est d'elle que le comique des Fables tire non seulement son unité mais aussi ses caractéristiques de subtilité et d'élégance.

(p. 138)

Those familiar with the Fables may well react to these sentences with an impulse of vague recognition: unmistakably, these are Lafontainian traits mentioned by a sensitive scholar who knows her poet intimately. The problem with her comments, however, is that they do not measurably advance our awareness of irony in the Fables as a distinct phenomenon. Such notions as "sourires … de l'intelligence et … de la tendresse" or "subtilite" or "elegance" are simply too imprecise to be very helpful as identifying features.

At this point there seems to be a slight shift in terminology, with comique being substituted for ironique as a descriptive label, because in the next paragraph we read:

Toute vision comique semble, de par ses conventions mêmes, impliquer une certaine sécheresse: simplification du dessein pour que s'accuse toute l'absurdité d'une contradiction, isolement du personnage comique coupé du réel ou du normal, détachement du spectateur à qui est interdit tout mouvement profond de sympathie.

(p. 138)

If the critic intends to incorporate irony into the comic vision, it is unclear how one concept relates to the other. Detachment of the spectator (or reader) is often considered a basic property of irony in literature. How can we be sure, if this is judged to be the probable response of an audience to a work or passage, whether the structure in question is ironic or comic or both?

De Mourgues goes ahead to state, in regard to the Fables, "quant au detachement du lecteur. il est assure d'avance puisque cet univers ou parlent les poissons est de pure fantaisie." It is true that readers of these poems are likely to be struck by the incongruity of animals talking and behaving as people do, but is the universe of the Fables more fantastic (as a world of esthetic invention) than that of Phèdre or Madame Bovary or any other novel, play, or poem? Does fantasy necessarily produce detachment? (My reaction to the recent science-fiction filn E.T. was in no way detached although extraterrestrial beings remain—so far as we can tell—in the realm of the fantastic.) Is every work with personified beasts ironic? It seems to me that one of La Fontaine's principal accomplishments was to add elements of irony to the traditional Aesopic apologue. To be sure, Odette de Mourgues's grasp of what constitutes irony in the Fables is not limited to the simple animal-as-human parallel (see, for instance, her illuminating discussions of "La Grenouille et le rat," IV, II, and of "Le Rat et l'huitre," VIII, 9: pp. 139-41, 176-82). My quarrel is not with her exegetical skill but with her somewhat casual handling of irony as a concept inadequately differentiated from other stylistic and rhetorical features.

Commenting on these famous lines from "Les Animaux malades de la peste" (VIl, I) highlighted by their unexpected rime en echo,

Même il m'est arrivé quelquefois de manger Le Berger,

the critic writes: "Ici, comme en beaucoup d'autres endroits, l'ironie poétique exploite les ressources d'un langage qui ne souscrit pas aux fins utilitaires de cet autre langage d'informations claires et distinctes qu'est la prose" (pp. 143-44). This sentence raises more problems of theory that would be difficult to resolve. Is prose a mode of expression that will admit no ironic touches, or would such irony have to be called ironie prosaïque? (Apparently not, because in a note on p. 151 the critic asserts that Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie, a work in prose, contains "une forme d'ironie poétique atteignant un degre de perfection exquise.") And to what prose is the critic referring—scientific, journalistic, everyday, literary, or all of these? If our fabulist aims to instruct as he pleases, and if there is a relationship between didactic intent and ironic vision, is his language not directed in part to certain "fins utilitaires"? Or can we say that in the lines quoted above (as well as in the "autres endroits" of similar thrust) the poet's lesson-giving self has been replaced by his purely artistic self? If so, when does he remove one of these hats in order to don the other—and what clues allow us to be certain?

As will be suggested later in this study, an important aspect of La Fontaine's ironic vision in the Fables is the poet's refusal to adopt the kind of anthropocentric attitude toward his characters that human readers are conditioned to expect. Odette de Mourgues calls attention to this lack of an ontological bias in the following passage:

Avec une frivolité délibérée, La Fontaine se plaît à ignorer la hiérarchie sur laquelle repose pour nous l'ordonnance du monde, cette échelle des êtres qui va du minéral à la divinité, classification immuable qui place par ordre d'importance croissante les choses inanimées, les végétaux, les animaux, les hommes et les dieux. Non seulement le poète substitue à cet ordre un autre ordre suivant lequel un pot de terre, une fourmi, une laitière, Phébus ou Borée sont tous des personnages d'égale importance, mais encore il introduit entre ces êtres des rapports qui, d'après notre jugement, ne sauraient exister. Ironie poétique de base, qui joue sur l'architecture même de tout cet univers poétique.

(p. 146)

Selecting as the basis of my discussion a fable of metamorphosis, "Les Compagnons d'Ulysse"(XII, I), I will attempt to show that the principle enunciated here has interesting implications for a general reinterpretation of the Fables.

Finally, summarizing her discussion of the words spoken by the fox in "Les Animaux malades de la peste," Odette de Mourgues appears to hint at the presence of a technique to be considered later in this chapter, and elsewhere, under the term "Double Irony," though she does not develop the notion sufficiently to permit full understanding of the double reality she intends:

C'est peut-être une des plus belles réussites de l'ironie poétique que de pouvoir exprimer non seulement un décalage entre l'irréel et le réel, mais encore un contraste entre deux réalités dont l'une n'existe, semble-t-il, que par le pouvoir magique des mots.

(p. 145)

Theoretical imprecision seems, as in other cases, to undermine this insight because any literary reality, in ironic as well as in nonironic structures, ultimately exists only "par le pouvoir magique des mots." Thus the boundaries of the "ironie poétique" she is describing become blurred.

A somewhat different perspective on Lafontainian irony appears in an article by Jacques-Henri Périvier published in 1971.⁴ This critic proposes, as one reason explaining why "la théorie de l'amoralité des Fables n'est vraie que d'une vérité apparente," that "… l'ironie de la plupart des fables trahit la présence d'un jugement subjectif et moral que le poète prononce contre tout ce qui n'est pas en harmonie avec sa vision mythique d'un monde idéal" (p. 335). One might ask by what internal or external code of ethics the poet's judgment is to be termed "moral," and also whether the designation poète refers to the person behind the work or the "implied author" (Wayne C. Booth's phrase) inside the work. These are not petty distinctions. Analysis of ironic structures in literature depends partly on making such determinations at the outset.

Like de Mourgues, Périvier indicates that instruction is an essential element of the fabulist's ironic approach, but he would presumably disagree with her contention that the ironist "ne saurait … chanter que sur un ton," for he writes:

… c'est en suivant les chemins de l'ironie, tantôt faits d'arabesques légères, parfois de traits sarcastiques, que nous retrouvons dans les Fables de La Fontaine cette vision mythique que l'imagination du poète se fait de l'homme et du monde dont elle valorise négativement le mal.

(p. 335)

What we do not have here is a mechanism for deciding whether a given light or bitter touch is in fact ironic.

Having declared that in the Fables La Fontaine typically poses as an objective observer of reality, Périvier states:

Chez le fabuliste (comme chez Flaubert, par exemple) l'objectivité se vêt d'ironie. Or, l'objectivité de l'ironiste manque d'authenticité: c'est une feinte de moraliste. Il se peut que cette adresse subtile soit parfois interprétée comme le signe d'une indulgence plénière accordée aux hommes par une intelligence sans illusion, maiṡ nous croyons qu'elle recèle Ie plus souvent le jugement moral d'un esprit courroucé. L'ironie relève de l'esprit de litote et consiste à dire le moins pour suggérer le plus: ici, à ne pas blâmer pour mieux condamner.

(p. 340)

My own reading of the Fables confirms that the veneer of narrative impartiality often has an ironic hue, but I am less willing to admit that authorial objectivity signals the pretense of a moralist. In the course of this study I hope to demonstrate that the irony of the Fables tends to be incompatible with the notion of an "esprit courroucé" condemning his adversaries by indirection. On the other hand, "l'esprit de litote"—approached from a different angle—will be seen as an essential property of the fabulist's ironicalness.

Périvier advances a fascinating interpretation of what is ironic about the human-like animals in the Fables:

L'ironie réside même dans le choix qu'a fait le poète de s'exprimer dans ce genre particulier qu'est la fable animale. C'est que, dans les Fables de La Fontaine, aux exceptions près, l'allégorie animale n'est pas le grossissement de la nature humaine …; elle ne traduit pas non plus un rapport d'équivalence …; l'animal est bien plutôt la représentation euphémisée de l'homme.… Dans les Fables, cet esprit de litote, intrinséque à l'ironie, rejoint la pudeur euphémique de l'esthétique classique.

(pp. 340-41)

Though this thesis is a refreshing departure from anthropocentric perspectives founded on extraliterary criteria, one wonders whether it could be suitably applied to most of the nonhuman characters in the Fables. Besides, once the convention of personified animals has been established (in the first poem of Book 1), it quickly becomes (in itself) a rather banal source of irony.

But Périvier's view of irony in the Fables is more complex than that. He asserts that not only the poet's "vision démonique de l'homme," but also its opposite, "la vision également mythique de ce qu'il peut y avoir au coeur du poète de plus pur et de plus beau," can find expression by means of irony (p. 341). This interplay of contrary states causes irony in the Fables to be "un perpétuel démenti à elle-même." Périvier closes his article—and his discussion of La Fontaine's double attitude toward humankind—by offering the impression that "L'ironie est chez lui comme la lucidité du rêve" (p. 342). Such subjective language, lovely as it is, leaves the concept of irony in limbo.

A recent article by Roseann Runte features a more tightly controlled set of terms.⁵ Runte is interested in analyzing "the dialogue which the narrator maintains with his reader" in the Fables (p. 389).⁶ She considers the narrative strategies of the Fables to be quite complex:

La Fontaine created a self-conscious narrator who fulfils several roles and functions. He is a heterodiegetic narrator who recounts a story in which he does not participate. He is also a homodiegetic narrator who relates a tale which he has witnessed or observed either in real life or in literature.

(pp. 389-90)

She proceeds to isolate four separate functions assumed by her "homodiegetic narrator" and argues that "La Fontaine's particular art lies in the interrelation between the heterodiegetic and the homodiegetic narrators" (p. 390). As for the reader, he or she "enters the narrative on the level of the heterodiegetic narrator" and "is thus intradiegetic," whereas "the extradiegetic narratee is the virtual reader" (p. 392). According to Runte, "La Fontaine's extended system of dialogue between narrative personae and readers is unique" (p. 393). How do La Fontaine's fables differ from their sources? Whereas in the traditional fable "the author condescends to enlighten the reader," in those of La Fontaine "the reader condescends to join the poet in evaluating the allegorical relation and the moral as implied or stated." So it follows that "the Aesopian fable is straightforward while La Fontaine's is devious" (p. 394). A comparable distinction separates La Fontaine from his imitators, because "where La Fontaine is implicit, the eighteenth-century fabulist is explicit" (p. 396).

How do these findings confirm the "keys to irony" cited in Runte's title? She states:

The structure and tone of La Fontaine's fables meet the conditions described by many critics as characteristic of irony.… La Fontaine's homodiegetic narrator, when filling the testimonial function, shows himself to be a naïve witness and when fulfilling the ideological function, he demonstrates the limits of his own understanding. In short, this narrator claims to be something less than he is in reality. He plays the role of an eiron. He understates, renounces exhaustiveness and places confidence in the reader to interpret and understand, to complete the textual implications. The text itself is elliptical rather than encyclopaedic.… The term irony can be applied to the "fusion in a spectator's mind of superior knowledge and detached sympathy." This surely is the effect created by La Fontaine's narrator.

(pp. 397-98)

Much in this assessment is promising. In footnotes here and elsewhere in the article, Runte reveals her familiarity with a number of important theoreticians of irony, and her analysis gives evidence that she has reflected on certain problems of definition inevitably raised by the topic she is treating. Some of the concepts to which she refers will be developed in the next chapter.

Runte's analysis of narrators and readers in La Fontaine leads her to an explanation of how the poet creates what is commonly known as dramatic irony:

In La Fontaine's fables there are the erring characters presented by the heterodiegetic narrator. They are judged by the homodiegetic narrator and the extradiegetic narratee or virtual reader either agrees or disagrees with the homodiegetic narrator. These roles parallel those which are found in dramatic irony: the victim, the author and the audience. In La Fontaine's fables the audience (the reader) and the narrator collaborate to discover the victim.

(p. 398)

This contention appears fundamentally valid, but the critic does not explain the process underlying her identification of dramatic irony in the Fables. Can we always be sure, in reading this poetry, who the victim is? If so, what kinds of clues produce this feeling of certainty? A similar type of question-begging occurs in this assertion: "Another characteristic of irony is its manner of instruction. It achieves its effect through pleasure" (p. 398). I do not dispute Runte's claim that for our fabulist it is the dulce that matters most (" … La Fontaine concentrated on pleasure while the eighteenth-century fabulist considered enjoyment to be secondary to instruction"), but such a declaration about a trait of irony, in order to be persuasive, would have to include at least a minimal definition of pleasure and suggestions as to how the reader can determine whether such an effect has been achieved in a given poem.

Another aspect of irony in La Fontaine, according to Runte, involves how his attitude toward content has been interpreted:

The eighteenth-century fabulist failed to recognize the illusion which was deliberately created by La Fontaine. When he spoke seriously of insignificant matters it was ironic. The fabulists of the next century did not interpret correctly the ironist's mask. They saw it as a true face. They mistook appearance for reality. The result is the difference between La Fontaine and his successors.… La Fontaine's pleasantries seem serious, while during the Enlightenment, what was serious was made to seem amusing.

(pp. 398-99)

What Runte says about those who misunderstood the Fables could be applied as well to many twentieth-century readers (those, for instance, whose preoccupation with overt moral statements in this poetry is accompanied by a neglect of undercutting tone). However, I am puzzled by the claim that La Fontaine dealt with "insignificant matters." What explains this judgment? That many of his characters are nonhuman and thus of less consequence than people? This is the old anthropocentric bias informed by extraliterary considerations. That the Fables finally operate in a comic mode that is viewed—by tacit definition—as lacking the significance of tragedy or epic? If this belief is intended, it springs from a highly debatable standard of literary values.

In the following passage, Runte describes in her own way a process that almost any theoretician would ascribe to irony:

Irony, in general terms, is the clash between connotative and denotative signs. The superficial text makes a statement which is counter to the implied meaning. To interpret such a text the reader must engage in a process of reconstruction. He must peer into the text and unmask the eiron. He must tear down the surface features and reconstruct meaning. The author invites the reader to form a new conclusion. La Fontaine, through his narrative personae, commences the process within the text itself.

(p. 399)

In other words, appearances are deceiving in an ironic text. This is safe ground. In the next sentence, however, Runte creates an unexpected complication when she describes how La Fontaine develops the narrator-reader collaboration: "He dramatically engages with the reader in discovering the implications of the allegory." What causes trouble here is the reference to allegory. If allegory exists "when the events of a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure of events or ideas … ⁷it would seem very unlikely that the Fables are allegorical in general (a case could perhaps be built for a few isolated poems), because we do not find obvious and continuous parallels between the action described and a second level of meaning (e.g., between any Lafontainian lion and Louis XIV). Furthermore, the notion of a different "simultaneous structure" implies that the surface and hidden levels coexist, whereas Runte contends that the reader has to "tear down" the former and "reconstruct" the latter. Such activity is no doubt incompatible with the nature of allegory. Wayne C. Booth, discussing the allegory of a passage from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, notes: "the reconstructed meanings are added to, not subtracted from, what a strictly literal reading would yield" (A Rhetoric of Irony, p. 25). He proceeds to distinguish clearly between "stable irony" (to be discussed in my chapter 11) and allegory:

This distinction is not merely of theoretical importance. For the reader there could not be a greater difference between the traps laid by stable irony and the invitations offered by allegory. A naive reader who overlooks irony will totally misunderstand what is going on. A naive reader who reads an allegory without taking conscious thought, refusing all invitations to reconstruct general meanings out of the literal surface, will in effect obtain an experience something like what the allegory intends: the emotional and intellectual pattern will be in the direction of what it would be for the most sophisticated reader.

(p. 25)

Booth does acknowledge the existence of the category of "ironic allegory," but it does not appear that Runte is referring to it when she talks about "the implications of the allegory" in the Fables. Whatever her meaning, she returns to the motif in her concluding paragraph:

La Fontaine socratically asked his reader to become a philosopher and discover both his own and the narrator's errors. The invitation is indicated by the tension between overt and covert significance and is delivered in the dialogue between authorial personae and reader which frames the allegorical narration. The double-tiered literary structure parallels the intellectual construction the reader will build by the juxtaposition of antipodal meanings.

(p. 400)

Runte does not attempt to establish what might be the allegorical import of the Fables. Her final comment about the reader of this poetry (" … La Fontaine's reader is co-narrator, continuing the creative function in reconstructing in his own terms the significance of the fable," p. 400) seems a commonplace denoting the traditional role of the literary critic. If the meaning of any work were an unequivocal given there would be no need for interpretation. Happily such is not the case with La Fontaine. Disciplined reconstruction of meaning in the Fables is amply repaid. Roseann Runte's "keys to irony" do not unlock all its darkened portals, but her essay does represent a serious effort to grapple with meanings of a notoriously evasive rhetorical term. Despite some infelicitous phraseology (expressions like "extradiegetic narratee" call too much attention to themselves but do not necessarily advance our understanding of the poetry under discussion), she partly succeeds in laying a theoretical foundation for some of the ironies at play in the Fables.

Yet another approach to the fabulist's irony is revealed in a recent essay by Carrol F. Coates.⁸ This critic seeks to discover in the Fables the "meaningful interplay of various structures of sound, discourse, and images" (p. 62) said to characterize poetry in general. In the following paragraph, Coates explains how irony may be seen to underlie the coherently developed poetic texts to be discussed (works in which "no discernible structures can be assumed to be independent of or unrelated to other structures of the poem"):

The framework which seems to permit the establishment of a meaningful relationship between La Fontaine's deviations from classical poetic practice and the sense of the fables is that of an overriding ironic vision of society and human behavior.

(p. 62)

This general impression is explored with reference to these three "techniques of irony":

First of all, the discrepancy between the use of classical rules of versification and deviation from these rules would seem to be one manifestation of the poet's global irony. A second technique is the ironic aside or intervention of the narrator, who repeatedly interrupts both the exemplary fable and the moral commentary on the narrative. Finally, there is an important ironic mode of discourse, called in French discours indirect libre, which will bear a brief commentary.

(pp. 62-63)

The initial concept of "ironic vision" appears to float in a vacuum because theoretical underpinnings are absent. It is not expressly defined, nor do the three "techniques of irony" automatically affirm the poet's "overriding ironic vision of society and human behavior." Does the critic's discussion of these three techniques clarify their ironic basis?

As for the poet's use of style indirect libre, "Because it allows the narrator to assume the point of view of a character without subscribing to it, and to dissimulate his own judgments, it is an ironic mode of discourse" (p. 63). One can, however, easily imagine a character drawn with sympathy whose situation is nonetheless developed through the use of discours indirect libre. When, in portraying the woodcutter in the well-known fable "La Mort et le bûcheron" (I, 16), the narrator asks by means of an indirect strategy, "Quel plaisir at-il eu depuis qu'il est au monde?" (a question we can picture the character himself forming), the effect does not seem to be clearly ironic. Thus, free indirect discourse appears not to contribute, in itself, to a definition of irony.

Despite the interesting analyses of passages from "La Cigale et la fourmi" (I, 1), "La Cour du lion" (VII, 6), and "Le Corbeau et le renard" (I, 2), Coates's article does not adequately reinforce the hypothesis "that the ultimate sense of the meaningful relationship between poetic form and meaning lies in an understanding of La Fontaine's ironic view of the world" (p. 73) because the irony purportedly informing the poetic texts remains too fluid. Why is there a "level of irony," per se, in this opposition the critic perceives in "La Cigale et la fourmi": "the Cicada's joyous song expresses an esthetic perception of the world, while the Ant's sarcasm expresses a disdain for the Cicada's view and implies a practical perception" (p. 73)? It would appear that these juxtaposed viewpoints constitute the most straightforward element in the fable. And what, precisely, is ironic about the second level cited by Coates?

The next level of irony is that of the narrator, who presents a dramatic conflict in which the dénouement is the Ant's refusal of the Cicada's request, signifying the irreconcilability of conflicting world views.

(p. 73)

How does the narrative stance involve the reader in the razing and reconstruction of meaning? Is irony here another word for the plurality of potential responses? Earlier in the essay Coates had suggested

that La Fontaine may have deliberately played a game with his readers by placing at the head of the Fables an ambivalent fable, leaving Louis XIV and other potential critics to infer a lesson of the triumph of industry over the pursuit of frivolous pastimes, when a very different interpretation is possible.

(p. 63)

Coates may not be contending that irony and ambiguity are interchangeable terms, but the lack of preliminary definitions leaves the issue itself ambiguous.

Coates proposes the identification of "at least two levels of meaning in the ironic world view of La Fontaine" (p. 73), those that Susan W. Tiefenbrun (whose analysis of irony in the Fables will be treated next) has termed "topical" and "universal."

The topical level is that of the social and political world in which La Fontaine lived and to which at least some of the fables clearly allude. This is the world in which La Fontaine's patron, the finance minister Foucquet, can find himself denounced by his rival, Colbert, and thrown into prison almost from one day to the next.

(p. 73)

As Coates indicates, this dimension (in the 1668 collection: Books I-VI) has been extensively discussed by René Jasinski.⁹ For most modern readers this level of ostensible meaning is so deeply hidden (even in passages where allusive clues may invite such reconstruction) as to be virtually irretrievable. Although Jasinski's erudition is admirable (even awe-inspiring), searches for historical parallels tend to trivialize literary texts, abandoning the esthetic for the evanescent. On the other hand, irony, as conceived in the present study, directly addresses the problem of artistic worth. Besides, if the topical side of the Fables is almost always obscure, it seems to lack a condition required for the establishment of irony in a text: a mechanism permitting communication between the author/narrator and the reader, allowing the latter to reject the surface meaning and to comprehend the hidden meaning.

What, according to Coates, is the "universal" level of irony operating in the Fables?

The other level is that of La Fontaine's understanding of the universal laws of human behavior, his perception of a world, including that of Aesop's times as well as that of Louis XIV, in which men continue to act like beasts or puppets rather than like rational and compassionate beings with the ability to discern treachery, to moderate desire, to perceive and respond to social needs.

(pp. 73-74)

This assessment of the thematic significance of characters in the Fables differs markedly from Perivier's contention that the Lafontainian animal is "la representation euphemisee de l'homme." Although the poet's comprehension of behavioral laws may have ironic elements, Coates does not provide a basis for determining exactly how such irony is generated. Does the notion of men behaving "like beasts or puppets" refer to such creatures outside literature or within? Whether or not one detects here a trace of extraliterary anthropocentrism, it is not clear why the motif of beastly conduct on the part of humans deserves (in the abstract) to be judged ironic.

In short, as a vehicle for systematic application of criteria of irony to the Fables, this essay by Carrol F. Coates leaves a good deal to be desired, though it does make other kinds of contributions to Lafontainian studies.

Susan W. Tiefenbrun, in her buoyant essay on irony in the Fables, confronts the problem somewhat more systematically.¹⁰ For Tiefenbrun, "Irony involves the art of the hidden, the elusive, the oblique" (p. 144). She wisely chooses to simplify conventional enumerations or typologies:

Classical rhetoricians distinguished several varieties of irony which I prefer to call signs of the one technique whose structural model involves the simultaneous juxtaposition of mutually exclusive oppositions, a synthesis of dissonances, and the surface fusion of disquieting contrasts.

(p. 144)

Although the oppositional element of irony is presumably beyond argument, whatever definition of terms one may decide to adopt, it is not clear at this point whether the hidden sense is to be subtracted from or added to the surface meaning. Does the critic elucidate this matter in the following passage (which immediately follows the sentence quoted above)?

Double or multiple meaning and the disparity between statement and intention normally associated with irony are results of this synthesis and interplay of connotations, more accurately described in semiotic terms as an intersection of metaphoric codes.

(p. 144)

The notions of multiplicity of meanings, iriterplay, and synthesis (additive) appear to conflict with that of a "disparity between statement and intention" (subtractive), but the critic seems to favor the latter when, citing functions of the verbs chanter and danser in "La Cigale et la fourmi," she analyzes the ironic effect of sarcasm ("where what is said is the exact opposite of what is meant"). Tiefenbrun goes on, moreover, to assert: "The litotes or understatement, whose signs say less than they signify, is the essence of irony" (p. 145). While this figure can be seen to have additive properties (Chimene's "Va, je ne te hais point" in Le Cid, III, 4, means literally that and considerably more), this is not what Tiefenbrun intends; illustrating her argument with reference to the famous lines "La Fourmi n'est pas preteuse; / C'est la son moindre defaut" (1, 1), she contends that the poet "says the opposite of what he means and thereby creates not only the ambiguity of irony but the extension of meaning characteristic of evocative poetic discourse" (p. 145). Are these lines really ambiguous, however (three centuries of dispute notwithstanding), if the fabulist's hidden meaning can be confidently discerned? And is the relationship between irony and ambiguity so stable, so widely recognized, that it can be convincingly stated without demonstration?

Having noted, with regard to litotes, that "its rhetorical counterpart is the hyperbole whose amplified signs say more than they actually signify" (p. 145), Tiefenbrun is careful to explain that the mere presence of either figure does not automatically create irony:

A disparity between what is stated and what 'is,' or what is meant, is the necessary contrastive mechanism underlying irony. Thus all hyperboles or litotes are not automatically ironic; the classification system is more complex. An identification of a structural mechanism of contradiction must precede for the typology to be justified.

(p. 146)

Thus the oppositional quality of any ironic structure, now more clearly subtractive, remains fundamental.

Another "binary pattern" revealing irony in the Fables is conveyed by recourse to paradox:

Since irony involves the simultaneous expression of two meanings, it is the perfect vehicle for the depiction of nature's paradoxical reality. It is no surprise, then, that the oxymoron and paradox per se are common rhetorical signs of ironic intention. And whenever the writer creates an illusion, especially of beauty, and suddenly destroys that illusion by a change of tone involving a reversal and contradiction, a surprising ironic effect is achieved.

(pp. 148-49)

Here as elsewhere, Tiefenbrun reinforces her theoretical statements by referring to individual poems (the central focus of her analysis is Book 1).

In the following passage, while reiterating her basic position, Tiefenbrun joins the critics for whom the communication between author/narrator and reader is of primary importance:

When there is juxtaposition and equation of disparate elements, or when an identity is created between at least two opposed if not contradictory structures, the resultant incompatibility or contradiction is called an ironic effect.… The reader is an essential factor in the dialectical process for unless he perceives the relationship existing between a minimum of two equal and opposite elements of meaning, the incongruity is virtually inoperative, and the ironic effect is absent.

(p. 150)

The idea expressed in the final sentence, no doubt widely acknowledged, suggests a broader truth about literature that must be kept in mind: the success of any work—ironic or not—depends on its being understood by an informed, sensitive reader. As for irony, it cannot be comprehended by any reader unless the author has provided adequately explicit signposts. It is always essential to begin by searching for the signposts (elements that appear ironic according to a predetermined definition). To assume that the work is ironic and then to search for supporting evidence presents the risk of reductionism and other forms of misreading.

Here we find Tiefenbrun apparently starting at the hypothetical level:

That irony is essentially an oppositional structure is borne out in the fables if we consider merely the titles in the first book. Invariably two speakers, two ideas, two moralities are juxtaposed in a contrastive frame and in a symbolic language of allegory which is, in itself, contrasted to the direct language of the narrator's moral appearing usually at the end or at the beginning of the fable.

(pp. 150-51)

Although I am willing to accept that every ironic structure is in one way or another oppositional, it does not follow that every opposition in literature must be ironic. To be sure, in her essay Tiefenbrun does make many astute comments about ironic elements in the Fables, but in the first sentence of the passage just cited she seems to begin with the assumption of prevailing irony, then to use the argument concerning contrastive titles as evidence, ipso facto, in support of her thesis. Do such titles as "Le Rat de ville et le rat des champs" (1, 9) or "Le Loup et I'agneau" (1, 10) reveal in themselves "a disparity between what is stated and … what is meant"—Tiefenbrun's "necessary contrastive mechanism underlying irony"? While such titles are indisputably oppositional, it is not obvious under what conditions the "binary pattern" thus created will become subtractive. And can we be certain that a poem's "contrastive frame" is in fact ironic if the author uses "a symbolic language of allegory"? Soon she elaborates by relating irony to allegory as follows:

What is common to the fable, the allegory, and the satire is the necessary presence of hidden elements, messages concealed within a symbolic system that requires decoding and translation. Irony is, like language itself, an allegory for it says one thing and means another, is not meant to be believed but understood, and its symbols require interpretation for successful communication.

(p. 152)

At issue here is not the existence of hidden features but what happens to the surface elements after concealed elements are disclosed. If irony "says one thing and means another," would it not be more accurate to describe allegory as a figure that says one thing, hides another—and means both? The confusion stems in part from Tiefenbrun's decision (judging from references in her essay) to rely principally on Vladimir Jankelevitch. Though his book, L'Ironie,¹¹ should be read by anyone interested in the subject, his analysis, however sagacious and thought-provoking, is finally too dispersive and impressionistic to serve as a comprehensive theoretical model. Like Tiefenbrun (who refers to the following sentence), Jankelevitch assimilates irony to allegory: "L'ironie pourrait s'appeler, au sens propre du mot, une allegorie, … car elle pense une chose et, a sa maniere, en dit une autre" (p. 42).

Tiefenbrun, following Jankélévitch, adds alterity to her stock of oppositional terms ("Alterity is the essence of irony's deceptive powers by which surface language expresses the exact opposite of its intended meaning," p. 153—plus ça change..), quoting with approval his rather mystifying account of the matter:

Entre les possibles que l'intelligence lui donne a choisir, l'ironie choisit l'altérité la plus aiguë: elle exprime non pas quelque chose d'autre que ce qu'elle pense, comme n'importe quelle allégorie, mais le contraire, qui est l'autre le plus autre; l'extrêmement-autre. Et elle est antégorie en cela. Elle va d'un extrême à l'extreme opposé de cet extrême, c'est-à-dire a contrario ad contrarium.

(L'Ironie, p. 71)

It is not made clear how the earlier assimilation of rhetorical terms is to be reconciled with this attempt to distinguish irony from "n'importe quelle allégorie."

In the final analysis, the gains of Susan Tiefenbrun's essay on the level of explication are to a degree offset by the loss of sufficient exactness in her definition of the controlling term, irony. On balance this may ultimately be a small defect, but for my present purposes it is crucial.

Jules Brody's published reaction to Tiefenbrun's analysis (see note 10 above) raises other issues that deserve brief mention. Although he compliments Tiefenbrun on being one of the few critics who have "dare[d] come face to face with La Fontaine's use of language," Brody maintains that "she delivers Only as much as she can cram into the undersized and somewhat antiquated structuralist van" (p. 77). Whereas, he contends, Tiefenbrun "craves objective structures," La Fontaine can elude such an approach. "because along with structure, and often in place of structure, he gives us texture" (pp. 77-78). Unlike Tiefenbrun, who views "the thematics of alterity" in the Fables as "the enemy of familiarity and expectation" (p. 159), Brody discerns predictability in repetitive surprise effects:

When plants and animals always speak human language, when unexpected reversals always occur, when ambiguity and paradox are always present, when binarity, in a word, is so recurrent as to be predictable, is it possible to talk meaningfully of antiphrastic models emerging in reversal of expectation, or of ironic effects being actualized contrary to expectation? Or, in more pointed terms, are such models the stuff of deep or merely surface structure?

(pp. 78-79)

Proceeding to answer his own questions, Brody argues that from the "mature reader's" perspective, "the reversal model in La Fontaine, because it is recurrent and ubiquitous, obtains not contrary to but in fulfilment of expectation" and that for such an alert archilecteur "the structural pattern of La Fontaine's typical fable is about as unpredictable as the dénouement of Hamlet" (p. 79). I cannot imagine anyone henceforth examining Lafontainian irony without confronting these basic issues. With regular maintenance the "structuralist van" will not become outmoded for a long, long time, but binary structures may be as prevalent in a comic strip or a pulp-magazine fictional piece as in a fable of La Fontaine, yet it is unlikely that all of them inhabit the same esthetic dwelling. In other words, it is imperative that my analysis of irony in the Fables go well beyond an identification of hidden, oppositional ironic structures to a consideration of what is artistically valuable in such structures. Implicit in this will be a rationale for bothering to write this book in the first place. If this mission is not to be an empty exercise in literary scholarship, I must be able to persuade someone—somewhere—that irony is an element that makes the Fables worth reading. (Susan Tiefenbrun would surely agree; whatever my reservations about aspects of her definition of irony, her informed, impassioned readings of the Fables demonstrate, as she says, how it is possible "to find satisfying and serious intellection amidst the joys of light-hearted comedy," p. 159.) To convince anyone that irony in La Fontaine has esthetic value, it will be necessary to move above (or beneath) structure. As Jules Brody states, aligning himself with Jean Rousset, "The work is no more the sum of its structures than the forest is the sum of its trees" (p. 79). His abandonment of structure and advocacy of texture ("Beneath the structure, in the texture, is where the action is," p. 80) are justified in theoretical terms when he writes:

Decipher the code and you get the message; decipher conflicting or intersecting codes and you get mixed, paradoxical, ambiguous messages. The trouble is that poetic discourse shuns discursiveness. It should not mean but be. Its essential function is not message, but massage, not the communication of meaning, even multiple meaning, but the creation and manipulation of multiple attitudes towvards meaning.

(p. 81)

Such luminous thinking about literature, put into practice, can help to shift the balance that for much too long favored nonesthetic issues concerning La Fontaine ("Le fabuliste est-il ce qu'il semble être?") or moral, philosophical, thematic, or sociological preoccupations ("Les Fables doivent signifier au lieu d'être"). When Brody converts theory to explication, in his discriminating "textural" reading (to be discussed later) of "Le Loup et le chien" (1, 5), he joins a growing band of Lafontainian critics whose implicit motto could be the poet's declaration that "Les Fables ne sont pas ce qu'elles semblent etre" (F, VI, 1). What interests Brody in the writing of La Fontaine and his contemporaries is "the poeticization of the prosaic"; thus the critic summarizes his discussion of "Le Loup et le chien" ("a random choice" in the poet's large storehouse of fables) by contending that

the irony, or the poetry of doubleness and duplicity, has its roots not in the intersection of metaphoric codes but in the deconstruction of rhetorical modes, in the weaving together of opaque discursive, previously invented lexical elements in a poetic fabric.

(p. 87)

To probe, synthesize, and supersede the "opaque discursive" materials constituting the superficie trompeuse of the Fables: this ideal modus operandi will guide me in the chapters to follow, being utilized with as little imperfection and as much success as my struggling exegetical powers can muster.

My exploration of the ironic texture of the Fables will have as one of its aims a better understanding of the particularity of La Fontaine's literary art:

When binarity and its variants are invoked as the major sign of poetic efficiency, it is predictable that the same explication will be written for all texts by sophisticated, complex writers. This seems to be the inescapable fate of all formalisms. There are just not enough particular forms and structures available to accommodate the annoying variety and uniqueness of literary talents and artistic performances.

(Brody, p. 87)

But even before launching a discussion of the variety, singleness, and esthetic value of ironic devices in the Fables, I need to be reasonably certain that the elements under examination are ironic. It will therefore be essential to base my reading of the Fables on the most comprehensive, rigorous, and accurate theoretical analyses of irony currently available.

The two "ironologists" whose work I have found to be the most helpful are Wayne C. Booth and D. C. Muecke.¹² These two theoreticians provide the conceptual foundation underlying David Lee Rubin's excellent essay on "double irony" in the Fables.¹³ To avoid repetition, at this point I will refrain from discussing Rubin's treatment of theories advanced by Muecke and by Booth, because issues of this kind will be fully aired in the next chapter. Let it suffice for now to say that Rubin's approach is especially promising because he clearly recognizes the speculative complexities inherently related to his topic and because, acting on this awareness, he engages in careful, informative literary analysis from a position of theoretical clarity and coherence. This is the only sensible way to deal with a problem involving the use of a slippery rhetorical term, as I realized when drafting an article on irony in the Fables that was published several years ago.¹⁴ I am convinced that, though we surely disagree on various issues, in these essays Rubin and I were both on the right track, moving toward our objectives with safe, deliberate speed. In neither case, however, was enough distance covered to enable us to reach our destination. The journey amid thickets of theory to the heart of Lafontainian irony is long and hazardous. Now, in the company of some enlightened traveling companions, I propose to cover a wide stretch of this picturesque territory, though it be fraught with pitfalls.

Notes

¹A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 2.

²0 Muse, fuyante proie …: Essai sur la poésie de La Fontaine (Paris: José Corti, 1962), pp. 131-51. See also her shorter study, in English, La Fontaine: Fables (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), especially the sections on "Tenderness and irony" in chap. 2 and on "Wit" in chap. 3.

³ Unless otherwise noted, references to La Fontaine's Fables choisies mises en vers throughout this study are taken from the edition prepared by Georges Couton (Paris: Garnier, 1962). Other editions of La Fontaine's works being used herein are: Contes et nouvelles, ed. Georges Couton (Paris: Gamier, 1961); Oeuvres diverses, ed. Pierre Clarac, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). These editions will be abbreviated, respectively, F, C, and OD, unless the context makes obvious which work is being quoted. References to individual fables will give book and poem numbers in that order (for instance, "Les Deux Pigeons": IX, 2). The Tyler concordance (see Selected Bibliography) is a useful companion volume.

⁴ "Fondement et mode de l'ethique dans les Fables de La Fontaine," Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 18 (1971), 333-42.

⁵ "Narrator and Reader: Keys to Irony in La Fontaine," Australian Journal of French Studies, 16 (1979), 389-400.

⁶ Similar issues are likewise the concern of John D. Lyons, "Author and Reader in the Fables," French Review, 49 (1975), 59-67.

⁷Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, enlarged edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 12.

⁸ "Poetic Technique and Meaning in La Fontaine's Fables," in Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, ed. Sandra M. Cypess (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1979), pp. 62-76.

⁹La Fontaine et le premier recueil des "Fables," 2 vols. (Paris: Nizet, 1965, 1966).

¹⁰ "Signs of Irony in La Fontaine's Fables," chapter 6 of her book Signs of the Hidden: Semiotic Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980), pp. 143-61, is virtually identical—mechanical and minor stylistic changes aside—to an earlier version published in Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, No. 11 (1979), pp. 51-76; my references have as their source the essay as it appears in Signs of the Hidden. See also Jules Brody's incisive analysis of the PFSCL version, "Irony in La Fontaine: From Message to Massage," in the same number of that journal, pp. 77-89. No changes in Tiefenbrun's essay are the result of reservations expressed by Brody in his critique.

¹¹(Paris: Flammarion, 1964).

¹² Booth's A Rhetoric of Irony and Muecke's The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969) will serve as indispensable touchstones in chapter II; see also Muecke's shorter study, Irony (London: Methuen, 1970). The serviceable term ironologist, used by Muecke, will appear in subsequent contexts without quotation marks.

¹³ "Four Modes of Double Irony in La Fontaine's Fables," in The Equilibrium of Wit: Essays for Odette de Mourgues, ed. Peter Bayley and Dorothy Gabe Coleman (Lexington, KY: French Forum, Publishers, 1982), pp. 201-12.

¹⁴ "La Fontaine's Ironic Vision in the Fables," French Review, 50 (1977), 562-71.