Even though Wayne Booth claims only a secondary concern for critical theory, [The Rhetoric of Irony] is bound to interest us because of the importance of his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) and of his stature as an elder statesman of the educational institution. In his preface he … denies being an Aristotelian, sheds doubt on the category "Chicago Critics," rejects general systems or critical schools, and declares himself, in private at least, "an addicted ironist." All of this is surprising, particularly the last, for in The Rhetoric of Fiction Booth found little to praise in the pervasive irony of some of the greatest modern writers. To write ironically about irony, to come from Chicago and ridicule genre theory, ought to be exciting. What comes through in The Rhetoric of Irony, however, is a defensive treatment of the subject which tends to trivialize it. Where his earlier book rejected concentration on pervasive qualities, like "ironic harmony," Booth now professes a Longinian concern for irony as a literary quality that can be used in any of the innumerable "kinds" of literature, including congressmen's speeches, articles in Fortune, and pieces by Art Buchwald and Russell Baker. Working "rhetorically," he feels committed to but one assumption: that shared communication is highly important, and what he wants to tell us is how authors and readers achieve irony together.

Booth's conception of the implied reader (who rises to the level of the authorial presence he perceives) is genuinely Longinian. But one should not forget the sorrowful ending of On the Sublime, where the author despaired of his contemporary Greeklings, politically and spiritually enslaved. Booth feels no such qualms about his typical reader, "the average educated person of good will" (as he called him once—here, specifically, the members of his reading-aloud circle, who chuckle over Beckett's ridicule of the western intellectual tradition). Booth's complacency is at odds with the serious writing of recent times, which has developed irony, one might think, exactly in order to shake the reader out of his assumption that he is definitely well-educated or naturally good-willed. The voice we hear in The Rhetoric of Irony is not ironic, but avuncular. The book is about, not irony, but stability …, "Knowing Where to Stop" …, and staying secure under the threat of instability…. Its author has a preference for reliable narrators, not too distanced from his educated, good-willed self. Booth invokes a notion (it sounds like Eliot's, but Booth doesn't mention him) that we can share "how it feels" to believe something. Thus we can allow ourselves to share "how it feels" to believe in existential irony. This limited sharing enables Booth to treat Thomas Mann tolerantly but minimally, and to dismiss Céline in a typical footnote. He expresses deep admiration for Kierkegaard's Concept of Irony, but finds it too Hegelian and abstract. It seems to me that he has insulated himself, authorially, and his readers too, not only from these masters of irony but from their serious critics as well. His footnotes, instead of serving a dialectical purpose, are a picket fence to keep out or put down rival spokesmen. The Rhetoric of Irony thus becomes a handbook of defenses for anyone who would like to read his way in perfect security through and around the ironic writing of the world. (pp. 361-62)

The longest section is Part II, "Learning Where to Stop." Our goal, in Booth's words, is to be "firmly located in a fairly narrow groove," that is, "in a recognizable literary genre that makes sense of everything I have read so far." But these genres are only recognizable on a strictly ad hoc basis, for Booth contends that genres are innumerable and should be determined extempore, from the individual text as it is being read…. [At the point] where the author states, as his guiding principle, that "stable irony is in itself a literary kind," a very typical footnote appears. In it deep-structure linguistics is invoked and patronized at the same time; then Booth goes on to plough Frye's Anatomy of Criticism as "destined from the outset both to succeed and to fail," while claiming support from it for his own notions, for "even Frye's enormous lumpings can serve to explain how genre-as-context provides readers with a firm and reliable control over their patterns of inference." He ends with a comment on Hirsch's "most influential discussion" of genre, which seems not to have influenced Booth, for he fails to put it into focus either here or in several other attempts. Booth will have little of Hirsch's (or R. S. Crane's) biographical and historical constraints on interpretation, nor of their serious exploration of substantially developed genres.

The chapter on evaluation gets closest to what might be called literary theory…. Booth offers a foursome, which he calls "levels" of evaluation. First is one of his critical "constants," that parts are to be judged solely in relation to the one single work of which they are a part. Then there is the level of what he calls "the rhetorical standard of the 'meeting of minds.'" The third level consists of an enumeration of the choices a critic has in his method of approach. Despite Booth's earlier statement that "there are many valid critical methods," and his disclaimer of systems and schools, it now appears that criticism must be one of these five: formal, expressive, rhetorical, didactic, or historical. Booth opts for the rhetorical mode and tells us it "dramatizes the inescapably social nature of literary standards"—"what is good is what we really admire." On the one hand, criteria of evaluation arise dialectically, when "we experience something together, sense its value as we experience, and then confirm that value in discourse with other valuers." But on the other hand, in a solipsistic process, "we judge the work by the values which we have learned to employ by reading the work." Next, denying particularism, Booth quickly adds, "we experience every work under the aspect of its implied general kind, or genre." Just as quickly, he takes away: criticism, he says, has "too often imposed constants derived from a few genres, when it should have sought multiple values discerned in innumerable genres." The reasons for such categories, he says, "legitimately vary from critic to critic."

Adrift on this antinomian sea, no art of criticism or theory of literature will give us any bearings; only membership in a comfortable community of readers will legitimize our sense of sharing secure truths. "For our present purposes," as Booth says, "it is important only to recognize the absolute split between works designed to be reconstructable on firm norms shared by authors and readers, and those other 'ironic' works that provide no platform for reconstruction."… The absolute nature of this split arises from the fact that rhetoric can only deal in established values; indeed, "rhetoric has always provided a way of establishing values in the world of fact." Thus, redundantly, but not surprisingly, Booth's fourth level of evaluation turns out to be "the rhetorical path." This Way teaches us to cleave to "our representative response to something designed to have a 'natural' relationship to the properly attuned mind."

Booth applies his method in detail to a number of very familiar works, printed at length. His analysis of Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge, based on what he takes to be her Catholic beliefs, is a humorless reduction of her Julian to a stereotyped Graham Greene mortal sinner. Booth misses, precisely, O'Connor's comic irony and, generally, her comic exploitation of Southern nostalgia, racism, the Oedipal complex, and the generation gap. It's a lot to miss; but considering his theory, method, and the audience to whom he relates, Booth's failure is not surprising. After all, the mark of rhetoric is not that it can be dialectic, as Booth claims, but that it is advocacy addressed as reliably as possible to a given audience. To the rhetorician, irony is a two-edged weapon he is wise to avoid, and if he uses it, to handle gingerly. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth fell afoul of irony which is not reliable, i.e., an explicit taking of sides. Now, in The Rhetoric of Irony, he makes an ambitious attempt to reduce irony from a form of dialectic to a form of genteel advocacy. (pp. 362-63)