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"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.