Christy Wampole, French professor at Princeton, tries to rally readers against irony, calling it a “pattern of negation [that] siphons energy from the cultural reserves of the community at large.”
There’s certainly a wrong way to go about irony: that kind of perpetually cynical, borderline nihilistic use of it as a Rortian defense mechanism against the clashing truth claims of a pluralistic culture. Detachment and cynicism congeal into a shallow sense of triumph. This, indeed, is a false way of living, for it is closed to the most basic philosophical and theological dilemmas of human existence; dilemmas like “what does it mean to ‘be good’?”, or “why is there death and why was I created and given life?” that are inescapable and demand answers. Wampole is especially concerned about the way this unseriousness impacts her students, young people at a top-tier school who (maybe more than anyone) ought to be feeling the power and urgency of these questions. In a follow-up interview, she opines that too many young people are “quite professional, eager, serious, and engaged,” inside the classroom but seem to behave quite differently (to put it gently) once gone. So far, fair enough.
But her denunciations of irony’s permutations eventually shade into a full-stop indictment of the mood. In doing so, she embarks on denunciations of anyone who “hides behind indirect language” and implores us to “look at your clothes. What parts of your wardrobe could be described as costume-like, derivative or reminiscent of some specific style archetype (the secretary, the hobo, the flapper, yourself as a child)? In other words, do your clothes refer to something else or only to themselves? Do you attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or ugly?”
Is it even possible to live in a world not like this? I wear a “costume” “reminiscent of an archetype” every time I show up at the office or attend a nice dinner or venture outside in cold weather. As do cops, judges, monseigneurs, and mail carriers. And is Wampole’s remedy–urging people to shun artifice and express their “real” selves without restraint or subtlety–really all that countercultural in a society whose popular entertainment is mostly confessional and exhibitonist anyway? Couldn’t we do with some more ritual? More importantly for this topic, why does irony have to–always and everywhere–be opposed to seriousness?
But what is irony, then, if it’s something broader than what the professor attributes to fixed-gear bike riders and apathetic college students?At a basic level, irony is what happens when a statement proves pluripotent; when an event has more meaning to it than was intended. It’s a rejection of the premise that “A = A,” that the perceived and the actual are the same, and that talk of metaphysics must be mumbo-jumbo. Its careful use can lead us to a far richer, and truer, experience of the world. “Serious irony” can serve to remind us that earnestness is no guarantee of excellence or rightness. It can shock us into realizing that the neatest blueprints, the most powerfully-felt convictions, may still be misguided, blind, or illusory.
And more than that. What about those ironies of faith, which add up to a kind of divine comedy? Surely there’s something ironic about the statement that losing your life is gain; that an unanswered prayer or unexpected suffering can, in some inscrutable way, lead to learning and sanctification; that bread and wine appear to our senses unchanged but become the body of our Lord. Wampole is right to note that fundamentalists aren’t ironists; she’s wrong about the religious. That maligned “indirectness” is a major way we comprehend and relate to the divine.
November 21st, 2012 | 3:50 pm
I think you missed one point in the article where she writes: “But our contemporary ironic mode is somehow deeper; it has leaked from the realm of rhetoric into life itself.”
That, I think, is the problem. She isn’t writing (I don’t think) against formality. A mailman isn’t being ironic by wearing his uniform. An upper-middle class college student, though, is being ironic when he appropriates elements of working class culture.
She’s not really talking about normal expressions of irony in writing or art, either. She’s talking about irony as a way of life. Normal irony works as expressive form because of the disconnect between the expected and the actual. But when you start with irony as the foundation, when you build your entire life around it, you lose the sense of the expected.
November 21st, 2012 | 3:58 pm
She’s entirely right about the religious as far as the sort of irony she’s describing is concerned. She’s using the word “irony” not in its full sense, but in a fashion that instead denotes the disillusionment of our age. She’s talking about the sort of “irony” that comes of wearing a plaid t-shirt as if you were a farm-hick, even though you’re an Ivy League student who’s never been on a farm in your life. She doesn’t mean things like literary irony, or the “ironies of faith.”
As she says: “Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind. My friend Robert Pogue Harrison put it this way in a recent conversation: ‘Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony.’ ” This is deeply true of religious people, all Christians included: I don’t know a single Catholic (I’m Catholic) who is a hipster (hipsters are the great wearers of plaid shirts for ironic reasons) for this reason. They are too engaged with deeply real things, even if there are paradoxes at the heart of them, such as “whosoever would lose his life will save it.”
You say, “Couldn’t we do with some more ritual?” I think we could–ritual is one of the hallmarks of the deeply real. (Again, think of the Catholic Church.) But to take your clothing example: more ritualistic wearing of clothing (say, dressing up more, which I think it’s a terrible shame people don’t do), is not at all the same thing as wearing clothing in an ironic sense (say, a flapper head-band). The former makes certain truths more manifest (respect for the people you’re with and the place you’re going, respect for yourself), while the latter has a hollowness to it, a sort of fake bravado (look at me, I like to pretend I live in the 1920s, but I don’t). The latter hides the truth, attempts to empty it out even, rather than clarifies it. The fact that we have less ritual today than we used to is just one more indication of how much the “ironic” has taken over in modern life.
I say this as one just off a college campus with a goodly hipster contingent.
November 21st, 2012 | 4:22 pm
One follow-up thought: the types of irony you describe actually point to deeper truths; the type of irony Prof. Wampole is talking about does not (unless it points to disillusionment with things like deeper truths). They’re different breeds entirely.
November 21st, 2012 | 7:36 pm
She has as much chance of being taken seriously as the poor dom at Oxford in 1950 who said that television would fail because it was a combination of Latin and Greek.
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