Literary studies

The twenty-second entry is la distance ironique, and French keeps a ready-made pair of phrases for it that English has to talk its way around. Reading a sentence straight, as a plain statement of fact, is prendre quelque chose au premier degré; reading it at the distance this entry names is au second degré. Neither is critical jargon. Il l’a pris au premier degré is said of somebody who missed the joke, c’est du second degré warns a reader not to take the line at its word, and il n’a aucun second degré is a complaint about a person rather than about a text. English owns the idea and owns no noun for it. It reaches instead for « literally », « at face value », « tongue in cheek » and « deadpan », and each of those names a tone or a delivery rather than a level of reading. The French pair puts the two readings on one staircase and numbers them, which is why a critic can say that a whole novel is written au second degré and be understood without another word.