mode (Frye 223-239).
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The idea that irony operates on some such denial of a formal or structural expectation underlies Northrop Frye’s original concept of the narrative pattern. The central principle of ironic myth is best approached as a parody of romance: the application of romantic mythical forms to a more realistic content, which fits them in unexpected ways. The important term is parody. Although we usually think of parody as the humorous use of the writer’s style to that a subject strikingly uncharacteristic of his work, there’s a familiar tradition in literature of structural parodies. Whether stylistic or structural – and admittedly, the line is hard to draw – the effect of parody depends on some violation of a convention that requires the equivalence between manner and matter, form and content (Foulke and Smith 860).
There’s in the work of contemporary ironists a variety of compounded duplicity, in the face of which the innocent general reader has little assurance that there is a meaningful system on which he and the author would agree or at least consistently disagree. Pervaded by incongruity, irony resists our terms and categories, and we are reduced more often than critically comfortable, to negative definitions and to working through antonyms from the other narrative forms toward irony. Our sense of the divine that gives order to the narratives of romance leads us to recognize the principle of disorder that confuses the ironic narrative (Foulke and Smith 861).
Perhaps the better strategy is to characterize the world of irony in the negative to speak of it as unidealized existence without laying claim to a greater