Irony in Alice Munro's "Dance of the Happy Shades"

A cognitive perspective

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between present-tense usage and irony in short fiction which has not been worked on so far. It chooses "Dance of the Happy Shades" by Alice Munro (1968) for its narrative and textual complexities. The paper's descriptive-analytical methodology works on three different but interrelated levels: story level, discourse level, and text level. On the story level, the study first detects situational ironies in "Dance" by deploying Shelley's bicoherence theory (2001). To detect the ironic on the discourse level, the paper attends to Munro's present-tense usage and technique of free indirect speech and investigates how they ironize readers' performance both as readers and social units. Analyzing the juxtapositions that Munro's text sets up with its mythical subtext is a matter of text level; the paper argues the Orphic subtext backs up the tensions between the characters. The paper finds out that minimizing the distance between story level and discourse level, present narration and free indirect speech carry out a meta-cognitive function by sharing a common ground between readers and characters. Highlighting the distinction between the dual-voiced narrator's restrictions and readers' freedom to "glance back" and re-envision their mimesis, the paper detects an intricate ironical turn in the latter's perspective with respect to children with Down syndrome.