What I want to understand is when/how/why it is and isn’t “appropriate.”
In an essay called E Unibus Pluram, Dave Wallace (ahem, DFW) said this:
Irony is not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”
This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in soundbites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.
When I saw the term “ground-clearing,” my mind went immediately to wildfires, and it occurs to me that that’s a pretty informative analogy. Irony/mockery/sarcasm, as I see it, is a pretty potent lens through which to clear some of the flimsy or inferior mental brush by examining it with a skewed, almost angry distance and magnifying (and thereby destroying) it as ridiculous or sad.
That’s what irony/mockery/sarcasm is good for. But three cautions:
1. Like wildfires, irony/mockery/sarcasm has a tendency to clear not just the flimsy, inferior stuff but also some of the sturdy, good stuff.
2. While irony, like wildfire, may provide a more fertile ground for things to grow, the irony/fire itself cannot grow anything. That requires a much slower and more delicate process.
3. Irony/mockery/sarcasm, like wildfire, can sometimes spread, well, wildly, changing directions suddenly and jumping over roads, rivers, and firebreaks into residential neighborhoods and into your own precious intellectual backyard.
2. While irony, like wildfire, may provide a more fertile ground for things to grow, the irony/fire itself cannot grow anything. That requires a much slower and more delicate process.
3. Irony/mockery/sarcasm, like wildfire, can sometimes spread, well, wildly, changing directions suddenly and jumping over roads, rivers, and firebreaks into residential neighborhoods and into your own precious intellectual backyard.
My conclusion, then, is that trying to suppress irony/mockery/sarcasm in some attempt at Perfect Sincerity is every bit as unwise as trying to suppress wildfires, but be very, very cautious of overuse because it is singularly destructive (incapable of being constructive) and risks spreading into precious, personal territory.
A fourth caution: While it’s okay – good, even – to let these intellectual wildfires happen inside your own skull, you should probably be wary of letting them penetrate too deeply your interactions with other people. Here’s DFW again:
And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.”
So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”
