Sharing a joke

Reading Thackeray: A Literary Life by Peter Shillingsburg and finding that he loses me a little in making his defense of Thackeray. In a more general sense I'm lost because he seems to know a lot of people who don't think Thackeray is being ironic all that often; if you know somebody is making a joke when he ambles up beside you, puts his thumbs in his lapels, and begins talking about how grand he is, this might be a remedial course in Thackeray studies. 

(Also, and I hate to even put this in the first post of this blog, he appears to have it out for our namesake and the focus of this society, the eminent novelist Arthur Pendennis. I shudder to think what he will say about the sainted Mrs. P and dread to consider whether we will have to exchange words over it.) 

Specifically, though, I think he's missing a not-just-possible read of the famous passage he's explicating here—

And while the moralist who is holding forth on the cover, (an accurate portrait of your humble servant) professes to wear neither gown nor bands, but only the very same long-eared livery, in which his congregation is arrayed: yet, look you, one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it, whether one mounts a cap and bells or a shovel-hat, and a deal of disagreeable matter must come out in the course of such an undertaking.

Readers tend to agree that Vanity Fair is a wicked place, etc. But, says the skeptical reader, since Vanity Fair, the book, is in Vanity Fair, the place, does it not also partake in the falsenesses and pretensions of the place? We immediately catch the narrator in a truth, which is a lie, if we think the speaker is Thackeray the trustworthy author. So when this narrator says: 'one is bound to speak the truth as far as one knows it', we may justly suspect that he is hedging pulling our leg again - rather than alluding merely to every person's limited access to knowledge or truth.  

We are confirmed in this suspicion, when in the next two paragraphs he describes first an Italian street story-teller in Naples and then actors on the French stage. In Naples the story-teller joined with his rag-a-muffin audience in responding to the villains of his tale with a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster... so that the hat went round and the bajocchi tumbled into it in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy', the story-teller laughing all the way to the bank, so to speak. In the little Paris theatres, the narrator goes on, French actors refuse the parts of vile Englishmen and brutal Cossacks and 'prefer to appear, at a smaller salary, in their real character as loyal Frenchmen'. In both cases, the story-teller, the actors and the audience join in treating the fictions as real. By calling attention to the Italian and French mistake of taking fiction for truth, however, the narrator of Vanity Fair has re-emphasized that fiction is not real and that Vanity Fair is fiction. It is a warning not to fall into the mistake of taking the story at face value.

Ironic insincerity pervades the narrator's next claim 'to show up and trounce his villains... because he has a sincere hatred of them which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse and bad language'. Readers know he is pulling their leg, for he has just made fun of the French and Italian audiences for doing what he now pretends to do himself: treat fictional characters as real persons. It seems clear to me that the narrator expects readers to know he is pulling their leg for at least two additional reasons: First, in the next paragraph he says, 'I warn "my kyind friends" then, that I am going to tell.... The clue is in the quotation marks and spelling of 'my kyind friends' - an echo of the stage manager, Alfred Bunn's, greeting to Drury Lane Theatre audiences. So the narrator, who 'must tell the truth as much as one can', is nothing but a stage manager. Indeed, he never seriously pretended to be anything other than that - as he declares in his preface, significantly titled Before the Curtain'. (74-75)

Setting aside the strange and I think unnecessary Vanity-Fair-recursion at the front, couldn't this all also be explained by Thackeray telling us a string of little jokes that he knows we're in on? In attempting to preserve Thackeray's pretty heavy-handed irony for what must be the dimmest readers in the world he has pushed it an extra layer deep, where Thackeray is intentionally using misdirection when he contradicts himself instead of winking at his readers, who he knows are going along with him.