Isn't it ironic? Well, actually, no.
If you wish to spend an exhausting night nit-picking with your friends, you need only bring up the subject of irony. What is it? you ask, and in seconds people are running around getting dictionaries, making fine distinctions, ranking and ordering, and issuing pronunciamentos. In most instances, all are as one in deploring the use of the word "ironic" to mean "coincidental," but after that everyone goes off on different tangents: some trotting out definitions, others producing examples, and yet others disappearing into the thickets of the history of ideas. I, myself, invariably bring up Kierkegaard.
What puzzles me most about irony is the use to which it is said to be put by certain contemporary writers, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers being the two most frequently mentioned, to which I would add other Americans and a whole raft of British writers, among them, in their various ways, Zadie Smith, Jim Crace, and Lawrence Norfolk. I could not bring myself even to pick up Eggers's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" because its title, so arch, so thoroughly pleased with its mischievous self, makes me physically ill. And as for Wallace's "Infinite Jest": just horrid and smug. A bore in book form, a thing of over a thousand pages, hundreds of which I didn't read, my constitution giving out under the weight of so much knowingness. The point is, there seems to be general agreement that "irony" is the word to use in describing what writers of this ilk are up to.
To use irony in the most basic sense means to say something that only the dumb cluck would think you mean literally, and in doing so, you mean to impeach the assumptions that lie behind that dumb-cluck understanding. It should follow from this that you are doing this dirty work from a position that you could articulate if you didn't mind being tiresome. Irony, I'm sure someone else has pointed out, is like judo: You use your antagonist's own weight to bring him down, but to do so, you must have purchase, which is to say, have a position yourself. And what is the position of these young(ish) writers? Is it a consciously adopted postmodernistic nominalism that replaces categories with coincidence? That's part of it, but I sense that underpinning this is a reluctance to be caught taking a position, of showing or portraying authentic feeling -- and authentic feeling, I also sense, is being confused by these writers with its flabby impersonator, sincerity. The whole problem may boil down to young writers watching so much television they are unable to distinguish between the two.
No one has delineated the hollow that lies at the center of the contemporary "ironic" novel so well as the literary critic James Wood; indeed, no one has written better about most of what he writes about. "The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24) is a collection of 22 pieces (one of which, I must disclose here, is on my late father's work). Two related phenomena are evident in the sort of novels I'm talking about, novels Wood calls works of "hysterical realism." One is their intense busyness: Tributary stories break out at every bend in the narrative, and the pages explode with potted histories, side excursions, freakish events, flukes of fortune, and puckish congruences. "The big contemporary novel," Wood writes, "is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness as if ashamed of silence." Wood finds this frenzy to be evasive, and what is being evaded is the embarrassment of representing character. Such novels "are books of great self-consciousness with no selves in them; curiously arrested books which know a thousand different things . . . but do not know a single human being."
The other phenomenon shared by such works is that their authors (in this case Jonathan Franzen) are "always a twisted adjective ahead of their characters." Here is that smirkingness so perfectly encapsulated in the title of Eggers's book. This is irony for such writers, but it strikes me as being merely bad faith. Wood goes on elsewhere in this thoroughly rewarding book to distinguish between, on the one hand, what he calls "the comedy of correction," which he rightly identifies as being satiric irony informed by a religious outlook, and on the other, "the comedy of forgiveness," a subset of which he calls the comedy of "irresponsibility." But irony is my subject here, so I must pass on.
In his introduction to "The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology" (Princeton University, paperback, $16.95) Thomas C. Oden declares that Kierkegaard is "the funniest philosopher of all time." Maybe so, but look at the competition. Be that as it may, I would say that Kierkegaard is the greatest theorist of irony, however, and that Oden himself is a magnificent guide to his thought on this problematical subject and on Kierkegaard's thought on humor in general. As Kierkegaard conceives it, irony is "a mode of existence"; specifically it is the predicament of the aesthete, of the person who lives for the perfect moment and who comes up against the inevitable contradiction between unlimited desire and the limits of appetite and time. Anticipation and fulfillment are not a continuum but a contradiction. At first sight this would seem to have nothing at all to do with irony as we ponder its meaning in the 21st century. And yet all irony, even the least rigorous, asserts a contradiction. But the attitude of the modern ironist is a knowing, mocking one that suggests that there is, unknown to the dupe on the page, nothing out there. Nothing means what this pathetic creation thinks it does because nothing means anything -- a situation made all the more "ironic" by the phenomena of apparent congruences, of coincidence. When one reads Kierkegaard -- and often more intelligibly for the general reader, someone like Oden -- one sees why books written in a contemporary modern vein of irony are so profoundly boring.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@earthlink.net.
