THE EVOLUTION OF SHAW’S IRONIC PERSPECTIVEIn 1919 Shaw wrote “Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall” thepreface toHeartbreak House. As he had inCommon Sense, Shaw analyzedthe causes and impacts of the war, using irony as extensively as he hadin 1914 (Hanchett Hanson, 19994). But the preface toHeartbreak Housereflected a different ironic point of view. The first clue to this shift was thatroles were not assigned so clearly up front in theHeartbreak Houseprefaceas they had been inCommon Sense. In particular, Shaw’s role as ironistwas not as stable. At several points in the initial pages of “HeartbreakHouse and Horseback Hall,” he used “we” in describing thealazons’perspective. At one point later in the essay (“ The Sufferings of the Sane”),he described himself explicitly as a victim of the situation. Everyoneseemed to be victims of the irony—Shaw was, after all, looking back on aworld war.In other words, there was a shift in the specific motivation that con-tributed to Shaw’s perceptual dynamic, a shift in the problem he was tryingto solve. Making sense of the horror that Europe had been through and con-templating a future after that experience was very different from trying toinfluence international policies in 1914. Ironic thinking still applied. Justas he had in the early months of the war, in 1919 Shaw juxtaposed whathe saw as blind, foolish and self-centered perspectives with the possibil-ity of political wisdom. But looking back, after the war, everyone sharedthealazon’spredicament. Given human nature, it had all been inevitable.After the conflict, no one was in the now hypothetical seat of politicalwisdom.We commonly call such perspectives cosmic irony, irony of fate or self-irony—world views in which at least certain ironies are inescapable. Aspreviously mentioned, Muecke (1969) called these world views GeneralIrony. Like Western culture as a whole, at the end of the war Shaw was
Only the first 23 topics of “Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall” (1919c) were analyzedbecause the remaining topics focused on the roles of theater in politics, which had not beenaddressed inCommon Sense. Compared to the .88 distinct situational ironies per 100 wordsinCommon Sense, .89 per 100 words were found in the first 23 topics of theHeartbreak Housepreface (interrater reliability, 81%).