You may recall the following explanations from high-school English. When a player throws a baseball that goes wildly astray to a fellow-player, breaking a neighbour’s window, and causing the intended recipient to call out, “Brilliant!” the speaker does not of course mean this. He has used sarcasm or verbal irony. He means the opposite of what he says. The offending player is unlikely to interpret the comment as applause. When a long-serving employee, having regaled his colleagues frequently, and at length, with the details of how he will spend his retirement, drops dead suddenly at the bus-stop minutes after having said his final farewell to his workplace, this is also ironic: it is called irony of events. Expectations are thwarted by their opposite: unsuspected circumstances that some might call fate. When a character in a stage play or film drama is blissfully unaware of a terrible truth that the audience or other characters, or both, know full well, the tension in this situation is said to be full of dramatic irony. Once again, a victim of his own ignorance is unaware of his peril. All three of these are each isolated examples of irony, available to anyone who sees a discrepancy between appearance and reality, or between a fact and the value attached to it.
For the true ironist, however, irony is not merely a method or clever literary technique, but a settled way of life. Ironists are not made, but born. They are contrarians at odds with popular sentiment, outsiders in self-imposed exile from their own societies, observers and commentators rather than participants, detached from the fever of the busy world around them, many of whose activities seem to them to border on the absurd. The absurd “may be taken to symbolize the incurable and chimerical hoax of things” of life, and not its “corrigible deformities,” says Morton Gurewitch; “the vanity of vanities that informs the world’s irony is beyond liquidation.” In an era like our own, notorious for but not limited to Pearl Harbour, threatened nuclear or climate catastrophe, sexual confusion, economic and social disparity, despoiling of the planet, “ethnic cleansing” and the Holocaust, the ironist cannot accept the mantra that “progress” will bring utopia. He (or she) is not a reformer. “The modern ironist,“ adds Charles Glicksberg, “is aware that the human condition is beyond remedy.” He “allows contradictions to co-exist and entertains a multiplicity of perspectives.” He is not enslaved to ‘single vision.’ According to Marjorie Perloff, the ironist and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein came to understand that “one cannot change society; one can only change oneself.” Irony “directs itself not against this or that particular existence but against the whole given actuality of a certain time and situation,” declares Soren Kierkegaard. Whatever their personal allegiances or prejudices, ironists stand apart from the world they perceive, somewhat like absentee landlords surveying with detachment the private squabbles of their tenants, making no judgements, appearing neither to condemn nor condone their fractious behaviour, in a stance calculated to provoke the thoughtful reader into a deeper examination of the human condition. Continues David Lodge, “When culture is seen as a process of continual decline, nothing is invulnerable to irony.” This ‘myth of decline’ is part of the view of life of many ironists who reject the opposing ‘myth of progress,’ which holds that what is new and untested must be better than what it replaces.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, once wrote that only a truly intelligent person can “hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Sheila Burbridge goes further, crediting the ironic view of life with this very capacity of holding “two opposed and mutually exclusive perspectives” in the mind simultaneously. The ironist, she says, is one “caught in what Soren Kierkegaard calls the boundary zone between the necessity to believe in the world as it ought to be and the compulsion to acknowledge the ugly reality of the world as it is.” Irony’s enduring merit is to tell the often-unpalatable truth about moral dilemmas and the myth of human perfectibility in order to oppose the smugness of the complacent and wilfully ignorant, the simple-mindedness of the zealot, the condescension of the utopian progressive, the camp follower of the propagandist, the dupe of deceptive slogans and the false promises implied in the omnipresent images of actors paid to smile in slick advertisements. Buyer beware. Exposing dishonesty may mean having recourse to such discomforting means as exaggeration, cruel humour, paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction. The writer may not mean what he appears to say. Indirection and obliqueness typify this double vision. Voter beware.
