ABSTRACT
In C. S. Lewis’s theological fantasy The Screwtape Letters, which is a text featured by its ironic inversion of having a senior devil (Screwtape) author a series of epistles to admonish a young tyro tempter on the tactics, or art, of diabolic temptation, Lewis’s devil is fantasized as a penetrating epistler with not only a deep understanding of humanity, but also mastery of irony on human corruptibility. Nevertheless, probing into the multi-levelled structure of meaning of Screwtape’s ironic discourse on the despicability of ‘human animals’, the reader may come to perceive some truth beyond Screwtape’s perception – that this infernal master of irony is really a figure of ridicule himself. Ultimately, Screwtape the demonic ironist is ‘betrayed’ by the rhetoric of irony without knowing it and becomes a real victim of double irony. Concerning what on earth serves to ‘unstabilize’ or betray the identity of the devil constructed within Screwtape’s letters, this essay argues that it is not simply the textual nature of irony, but also certain theologically informed ironic twists underlying the text of the devil’s discourse. In other words, the double irony of Lewis’s devil cannot be really grasped unless an interdisciplinary investigation is conducted, that is, approaching Screwtape’s ironic discourse from the twofold perspective, literary/rhetorical and theological.
