Irony

I’ve been spending more time than is probably good for me watching authors on YouTube. And one of my favorites, though I’ve still yet to read a single word of his fiction, is David Foster Wallace. I don’t know how I came across it, but I’ve been replaying this clip about irony over in my head all weekend:

And also this quote from his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction:

So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde. . .puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. 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 sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny 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 by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow. . .oppressed.

It’s something I think about from time to time, how little interest I have in irony. I’ve never felt I had the time for irony. Take reading. Even if I read at, say, a fairly good clip of 75 books a year, that’s only a few thousand books before I die. I don’t have time to read ironically. I’m only gonna read what interests me, what moves me. And that applies across the board. I’m lucky enough to get to spend a good part of my life inhabiting my own interests, but it’s never enough, and I can’t imagine throwing that time away.

I’m also heavily bored by it. I do like dark humor, and, yeah, play, but the only books I care about are those where there’s something at stake. There’s nothing that bores me more than an author who winks at you somewhere in the text, just to let you know it’s all a joke, that they can’t really be bothered to take it all seriously, and that aren’t you, the reader, an idiot for doing so. It’s the stuff of carrot jeans and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Which is fine, if that’s what you’re in to, but I’d rather eat dirt.