When my oldest son was a Boy Scout in England 20 years ago, I
once watched his troop play a game in which the boys formed a
circle around a troop leader holding a soccer ball. The leader
proceeded to throw the ball to the boys at random, saying as he did
so either “head” or “catch.” If he said “head,” the boy was
supposed to catch it; if he said “catch,” the boy was supposed to
head it. Anyone who slipped up and caught the ball when instructed
to catch it or head the ball when instructed to head it was out and
had to leave the circle. Eventually, only one scout was left
standing. That boy, as I have often had occasion to think since,
must have been one of nature’s ironists. He and the others had
certainly had an education in the central principle of all
ironic—and, for that matter, non-ironic— discourse, namely that
meaning depends on context. A boy who’d said that he would just
love to play such a game could have meant either that he’d
love to play it or that he’d absolutely hate it, and all but the
most literal-minded would have been able to tell which it was on
hearing the words spoken in their context.
The ability to read that context, to pick up the cues indicating
irony or its absence, depends on a certain degree of social skill
and experience in complex social interactions. Irony, that is,
belongs to the world of face-to-face communication, even when we
encounter it in a book or a movie. If we are able to recognize the
irony in fictional contexts it is because we have previously
experienced it, or something like it, in real ones. Maybe that’s
why, as we have begun to spend more and more of our time
interacting with each other remotely and electronically, rather
than face-to-face, it seems that our irony-reading skills have
tended to atrophy, or else to go haywire. This is producing, on the
one hand, a leaden literalism or, on the other, the sort of
paranoia which supposes that everything must mean something other
than what it says.
The latter is the world of the postmodern critic, that master
figure of the popular culture, in which everything is assumed to be
ironic. It is what makes possible the endless “reboots”—as they are
now called—of cartoon and movie franchises, such as this spring’s
of Star Trek and X-Men. The fans of both have
always been ironists, and so they are naturally open to new
“readings” of these classics. In fact they delight in them. If you
were never the victim of the naïve illusion that Captain James T.
Kirk was a real person in the first place, you are unlikely to mind
that he has become yet another simulacrum of a person. But—call me
crazy—I keep looking for signs of the culture’s reaction against
ironical excess.
Ten years ago, a young man named Jedediah Purdy, then still in
his twenties and home-schooled by hippies in West Virginia, wrote a
book titled For Common Things that was an attack
on the ironic culture as he saw it then—before there was any
Daily Show or Colbert Report and nothing
worse than David Letterman or Seinfeld to give irony a bad
name. Ironically, the anti-irony screed enjoyed a certain vogue.
The New York Times at its most po-faced published an
interview that treated this backwoodsman and recent Harvard
graduate as a reincarnation of H. D. Thoreau, or perhaps a sort of
humorless version of Abraham Lincoln, destined for greatness by his
call for a return to what he imagined were the rustic simplicities
of our forefathers.
Of all the silly things to be against, irony must be among the
silliest. It is like being against algebra. Irony is simply a
rationalization of the way the world—in this case the rhetorical
world—works, and has always worked. But people could sympathize
with the sort of social insecurity that must have lain behind Mr.
Purdy’s attachment to puritanical plain-speaking, and, with the
help of the New York Times, the book made enough of a
splash that that gentleman, now a law professor at Duke University,
has lately written another, even sillier book. It is called
A Tolerable Anarchy and is a tract on behalf of
liberal utopianism. I see it as a sort of sequel, which must have
grown out of the earlier book’s implied preference for humanity in
the abstract rather than with all its confusing imperfections.
Two decades before his denunciation of irony and a few years
before my son was inducted into the scouts, Terry Jones of Monty
Python fame, a champion ironist who was also a part-time
medievalist, wrote a book called Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait
of a Medieval Mercenary, which purported to show that
the man described in the Prologue to The
Canterbury Tales as a parfit gentil
knight was in fact a brutal and cold-blooded killer with
nothing chivalric about him. In fact, Mr. Jones was pretty sure
that there was nothing chivalric about medieval chivalry itself.
The arguments over his detailed evidence for this shocking
proposition have gone on for nearly three decades without anyone’s
thinking to ask what would have been the point of Chaucer’s
encoding the truth about his knight so successfully that it took
some six centuries for a TV comedian to decode it.
But then, in the lit-crit biz as it is practiced today, such
questions simply don’t arise. Irony is pretty much self-justifying
and, without it, the whole edifice of literary scholarship would
come crashing to the ground. In a recent issue of The Chronicle
of Higher Education, an English professor at the
University of Virginia admitted as much in the course of a quixotic
call for a moratorium on “readings”—that is, the critical
application of one of the many proprietary keys (“Marx’s, Freud’s,
Foucault’s, Derrida’s, or whoever’s,” as he put it) designed to
unlock the infinite number of ironic meanings of a text which could
not have been intended by its author. I wonder if this poor sap can
realize how much the very well-entrenched cultural phenomenon known
as postmodernism, which extends well beyond academia and into
popular entertainment, depends on the existing gentleman’s
agreement among critics to honor any ironic scrip as legal tender?
Literary scholarship first became a sort of Oklahoma land rush in
which a horde of fledgling intellectuals, bent on obtaining tenure
against fierce competition, sought to stake out their little ironic
territory wherein they alone might be supposed to know what this or
that monument of Western civilization really meant—or at
least could be made to mean. Now that every blogger on the Internet
can take part too, I don’t think we’re going to be giving up the
“readings” game, even temporarily, anytime soon.
Besides, the “texts” that are subject to ironic reinterpretation
now include the documents on which our government is founded. Every
judge is now an ironist, seeking new meanings in old documents by
which some progressive fad—the latest is gay “marriage”—can be
shown to be not only justified but mandatory. President Obama has
lately told us that a pack of legal ironists headed by his attorney
general are also to be turned loose on the so-called torture memos
written by officials of his predecessor’s administration so as to
find in them some way for their authors to be prosecuted as
criminals. Already, the George W. Bush administration has been the
subject of more ironic reinterpretation than any in our history,
including that of Terry Jones in Terry Jones’s War on the War
on Terror (2004).
Well, why believe the president of the United States when you’ve
got the finely tuned paranoia of Terry Jones’s—or Frank Rich’s or
Maureen Dowd’s or Eric Holder’s or whoever’s—“reading” of him to go
by? Still, you’ve got to think that even the po-mo critic must
sometimes get weary of such a soul-deadening exercise, set up on
the premise that nobody but he knows what anybody or anything is
really about. That may be why, in Romeo Castellucci’s
recent staging of Dante’s Inferno in London, hell was
represented between a pair of outsized quotation marks as the seat
of irony, where a Satanic Andy Warhol went about with a Polaroid
camera, snapping photos of the damned. It is, as Dominic Cavendish
noted in the Daily Telegraph, “a vision of unremediable
human loneliness.” Likewise, a staging of Beowulf in New
York had the legendary hero, in the shape of the nerdy-looking
author, Jason Craig, confronting three academic critics in the
place of the monsters of the poem. Of course, that was itself meant
to be an ironic joke, but I detect in it a further ironic subtext
of desire to leave the circle of the ironically clued-up, at least
for a moment, in order to breathe a purer air.
