New York Times / Books August 5, 2000
No Kidding: Does Irony Illuminate Or Corrupt? By CHARLES McGRATH
One person who was glad when "Seinfeld" ended was Jedediah Purdy. He is also, no doubt, eagerly awaiting Bart Simpson's retirement. Mr. Purdy is the home-schooled West Virginia wunderkind who last year, at the age of 25, published "For Common Things," an earnest, impassioned homily that urged us to rediscover civic virtue, both in government and in our private lives, and that blamed for our current malaise nothing less than irony itself.
Irony, he wrote, is a corrosive, world-weary habit of mind, "a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation, or the truth of speech -- especially earnest speech." He singled out Jerry Seinfeld, "irony incarnate," as a symbol of all that is wrong with our culture, but he could have just as easily chosen Bart or, for that matter, Dave Eggers.
Mr. Eggers, of course, is the public-schooled Illinois wunderkind who this year, at the age of 29, published "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," a memoir about the death of both his mother and father, eight years before, and about how he became, in effect, the single parent of his 8-year-old brother. From its title to its cheeky acknowledgements ("the author wishes first and foremost to acknowledge his friends at NASA and the United States Marine Corps"), to its own reader's guide to the book's themes and metaphors, to the very last page, which is a parody of Molly Bloom's soliloqy, "A.H.W.S.G." is suffused with jokeyness and self-awareness -- with a refusal to take its own enterprise seriously.
Yet this is also a deeply affecting work, one that makes a powerful, if uncon ventional, case for that most Purdyian of values, family togetherness; and it succeeds not in spite of its antics -- all the authorial winking and nudging -- but to a large degree because of them. The ultimate irony, you could say, is that Mr. Eggers's wiseguy approach allows him to invest his book with insight and genuine feeling.
So is irony a bad thing or a good thing? It depends, in part, on what you mean by irony, which has become a critical term of nearly infinite elasticity. We use it all the time (especially in the adverbial form) to refer to strange or untoward coincidence, as in, "Ironically, just hours after rescuing the cat from a tree, Jedediah ran over it by mistake in the pickup."
Or we use it, as counseled by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, among other authorities, chiefly to indicate sarcasm, as in, "Dave looked down at the mangled, lifeless feline. 'Nice cat,' he said ironically." (As the Times manual wisely points out, if the sarcasm is effective, the adverb is often unncessary.)
Etymologically, irony comes from the Greek word for dissembling, and the ancient Greeks used it in reference to that abiding preoccupation of theirs, the gap between appearance and reality, or between truth and belief. What interested them most was dramatic irony, which is what occurs when the reader or the audience knows something that a character doesn't (Oedipus was the favorite example); far from being funny, this was for the Greeks the stuff of tragedy.
The distinction between audience and character was also essential for the critic Northop Frye, who in his magisterial "Anatomy of Criticism" (1957) included irony in his taxonomy of essential narrative modes: irony for Frye is what happens when the character is in some way inferior to the reader, who then looks down on the work, so to speak, and sees the poor character embroiled in scenes of bondage, frustration or absurdity. (The great ironic author in this sense is Kafka.)
Frye comes closer to our everyday understanding of the term in his discussion of the ironic persona, which is essentially a kind of literary straight man; the ironist pretends to be ignorant of everything, Frye says, even of his own irony. The classic example here is the Swift of "A Modest Proposal," who says one thing and depends on his audience to conclude the opposite.
Irony in this sense is a rhetorical strategy for suggesting things you don't want to come right out and say directly, and it's a strategy of particular use in oppressive or censorious circumstances. Irony is what keeps Hamlet going, for example -- he's the Dave Eggers of medieval Denmark. And irony was for a time the preferred (and often necessary) method of Eastern European writers like Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera. This is the kind of irony that was in the mind of the Hollywood movie mogul who said: "Irony is what goes over the heads of the audience."
But irony in Mr. Purdy's sense is something different -- less a way of conveying hidden meaning than of undermining meaning altogether. Irony for him is an attitude -- a bad attitude. And Mr. Purdy is right in suggesting that this particular kind of attitude has its roots in television and in the political disillusionment of the 1960's. (Though he doesn't say so, a telling early example of the Purdy-Eggers split manifested itself during the 1969 trial of the Chicago Eight. The Jedediahs -- Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis -- wanted a serious debate on the nature of civil disobedience; the Daves -- Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin -- wanted to make fun of the entire proceeding.)
Irony in this latter-day incarnation consists largely of indicating that you are in fact being ironic. It's a way of putting invisible quotation marks around speech or action, the way Willis, the terminally ironic protagonist of David Gates's novel "Preston Falls," does. (Whenever he mentions his office "colleagues," for example, he's careful to precede the word with a meaningful half-beat of hesitation.)
This kind of irony also relies heavily on repetition and allusion. The first time Chevy Chase fell down, on the original "Saturday Night Live," it was slapstick; every week thereafter it was ironic. Much the same is true of Dave Letterman's various shticks; as Mr. Purdy suggests, the joke is at the expense of some hypothetical audience -- rubes and squares, or maybe people just awakened from a coma -- that could possibly take late-night television seriously or expect anything new from it.
What troubles Mr. Purdy about this kind of irony is that in its extreme forms it can lead to alienation and indifference; it can become a substitute for action, and even for thought, and amounts to a passive acceptance of things as they are. In the view of some of his critics, though, what's troubling about Mr. Purdy's prescription is that the society he envisions is apparently one that makes very little room for humor -- for laughing at those things that cannot be changed.
And earnestness, in its extreme form, requires that language itself be purified, scrubbed of all its puns and double entendres and hackneyed associations -- until, for example, you could use the phrase "a heartbreaking work of staggering genius" with a straight face.
In Frye's view, irony is a late and somewhat degenerate form. (It comes after, and is inferior to, myth, romance and both high and low realism.) But Frye's scheme is also a circular one, in which irony sometimes comes around to myth again. Clowns, he says, are just sacrificial gods in another guise. And perhaps this is where we are headed: to an irony of cosmic, mythic proportion.
In the meantime, we now have Jedediahs and Daves all around us -- in art, in business, even in politics: Anselm Kiefer and Jeff Koons; Bill Gates and Paul Allen; Al Gore and George W. Bush. One set of these prophets is telling us to please, get serious; the other to lighten up, dude. They would never admit it, but they probably need each other.