josh glenn (of _hermenaut_) on jedediah purdy

t byfield tbyfield at panix.com
Wed Oct 6 09:18:21 PDT 1999


<http://www.feedmag.com/daily/dy092899_master.html>

S E P T E M B E R 2 8, 1 9 9 9

"I AM NOT wildly interested in irony," Jedediah Purdy insisted in a

Slate Dialogue last week. "These days, though, it seems to be

interested in me." Accuse Purdy, the 24-year-old author of For Common

Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, of "unctuous

sentimentality," "manipulative pseudo-sincerity," and

"eat-your-vegetables earnestness" if you must. (Certainly, the Max

Beerbohm wannabes in the media have done so vigorously over the past

couple of weeks.) But while years of book-larnin' insures he'll never

catch your favorite Reality Bites reference, Purdy knows irony when he

sees it. Sure, For Common Things kicks off with a heartfelt diatribe

against those pathetic cynics -- you know who you are -- who lazily

substitute an ironic pose for trust and commitment, but as far as

sincere "love letters" to the world go, the book isn't particularly

mawkish, sanctimonious, or preachy. Why, then, are professional

ironists so consumed with Purdy these days?

In part, Purdy has become a whipping boy for the New York Observer,

Harper's, Salon, Slate, and the New York Times Book Review because

he's dared to say what we all quietly know already: one important

reason most of us can't be bothered to engage with "common things" --

moral values, social institutions, the natural world -- is our

Seinfeld-like inability to "cleave to demanding values," or even to

"remember how to value what we value." The real problem with this

diagnosis, according to many of Purdy's subtler critics, is not

necessarily that it's incorrect, but rather that Purdy radically

misuses the term "irony." Homo Seinfeldus may, as the book argues, be

pathologically cynical, smirkily sarcastic, emotionally disabled,

self-aware to the point of narcissism, and "sophisticated" in an

adolescent sort of way, but such a sad figure hardly exhausts the

possibilities of irony. For instance, Cervantes and Shakespeare -- and

even Purdy's heroes Twain, Swift, and Montaigne -- were satirically

detached from, while simultaneously engaged emotionally and

politically in, everyday life. As Purdy's Slate interlocutor, Michael

Hirschorn, pointed out with avuncular concern, we need irony to combat

shallow cheesiness and posey earnestness alike. Put that in your

corncob pipe and smoke it, Nature Boy!

But the debate doesn't divide so neatly into these two camps. Though

Purdy has been praised by the cultural conservatives at Time for

"panicking the languid sophisticates" -- which is to say that he's now

been both honored and scorned as an avatar of the "pundit-invented

trend away from sarcasm and toward deep sincerity," as Suck accurately

put it -- the tsunami of commentary about him is itself ironic, for

Purdy is not anti-irony at all. In fact, both before and after the

publication of For Common Things, he's written and said things like,

"for centuries, [irony] has been a friend of the human spirit," and "I

do not hate irony, or want it to go away," and "America might benefit

from more of the Socratic kind of irony." The latter comment is

important, because Socratic irony is, in Kierkegaard's great

formulation, an "infinite absolute negativity" which heroically

shatters the taken-for-granted in all its guises. Purdy champions

precisely this type of irony (he calls it "ecstatic irony"), which is

neither frivolous, aestheticized, nor apolitical, and which helps us

pay more attention to the seemingly trivial details of daily life to

which his book's title also refers.

Irony of the ecstatic sort might best be described as a form of

seriousness. As worked out in the life and thought of someone like

Oscar Wilde (whose ironic pose Purdy has elegantly praised as "a

lightness that is subtly aware of its moral weight"), irony is less a

cop-out from risks and relationships than it is an equilibrium between

a feeling of earnest involvement with a situation on the one hand, and

a comic appreciation of its absurdities on the other. To be sure,

Purdy is way over on the earnest side of this equation, and his

appreciation of absurdity is marred by his poor understanding of

pop-culture (which is often awkwardly cribbed, as though he's read

books about TV but never actually watched it). But it's also clear

that, like Wilde, Purdy's participating in the grand tradition of

Socratic irony. He's trying to employ what he calls "an intelligent

and resourceful irony" against "the human reserves of pompousness,

self-seriousness, and the leaden earnestness that always threatens to

run molten." And like Wilde -- like Socrates himself, for that matter

-- he's being persecuted for it.

Josh Glenn is a FEED contributing editor and mastermind of Hermenaut:

The Digest of Heady Philosophy, an independent journal of philosophy

and pop culture.



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