Printculture Articles : The Irony-Free Zone

The Irony-Free Zone

Culture

25 January 2005

David Lipsky’s Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point (Houghton Mifflin 2003), which I read last summer, is just the kind of book that appeals to me: a sort of modern day ethnography of a subculture that seems foreign and fascinating on account of that foreignness. In my early adolescence, I’d romanticized the kinds of bonding rituals that define male worlds like the military (or more specifically, men in war, as in The Big Red One), and all-boy boarding schools (think A Separate Peace), so the subject had a special hold on me. But that’s another story.

What I want to highlight are a couple of passages that appear early in the book. Having gained unprecedented access to the military school and its students, Lipsky is somewhat surprised to find that despite all their complaining, the students seem happy. By way of explanation, he observes:

They seem mentally fit, mentally scrubbed; I’ve never seen less depressed kids. It turns out that dressing like everyone else, sharing identical experiences, and being told you’re on a mission of importance to the whole country does wonders for the teenage soul.

A little later, he sums up the atmosphere of the place this way:

West Point is almost entirely without irony . . . . This makes sense: irony is the comic presentation of doubt, and there’s not much room for doubt at West Point. [and a few paragraphs later] Cadets entering West Point step into an irony-free zone, a place where sarcasm has been fought to a standstill. And an irony-free zone turns out to be an immense relief for human beings: a relief not to have to worry about sounding foolish or whether somebody’s statement has a subtext; a relief to accept the apparent meaning and move on.

I’d scribbled the lines down, and in returning to them 6 months later, post-election, I wonder if Lipsky’s formulation can explain more than the earnestness of young cadets in training. What interests me are two things:

1) Lipsky’s definition of irony as “the comic presentation of doubt” seems a useful way to think about this much abused, much maligned concept. Broadly speaking, irony registers, and exploits, the gaps between what is and what seems. In this understanding, irony is a rhetorical mode separate from any particular attitude or agenda in whose name irony is deployed and with which irony is often conflated. For example, in the case of “ironic detachment,” irony is the mode by which detachment is effected but is not detachment itself. But don’t take my word for it; check out the fairly comprehensive article in The Guardian by Zoe Williams on irony, its usage and abusage.

2) Given this definition of irony, I tried hard to imagine what such an “irony-free zone” would feel like to me. I tried to imagine that sense of relief Lipsky mentions, for I had never thought of irony, doubt, the looking out for subtexts as anything I needed relief from. In fact, the very idea of desiring such relief seemed downright incomprehensible. But then I started to consider: when the lies are repeatedly exposed, the scandals uncovered, the missteps and the belligerent denials about those mistakes are out in the open for all to see, and still millions of Americans choose four more years of “W” because they honestly believe he’s a good man, whom you wouldn’t mind sharing a beer with, has irony met its match?

Shortly after 9/11 there was a brief kerfuffle in the mainstream press when Graydon Carter, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, predicted the end of irony and Roger Rosenblatt intoned in Time, “One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony.” (Williams’ article touches on this episode as well.) Various other pundits quickly responded with appropriate skepticism and sincere critiques, and it wasn’t long before variations of the phrase “irony’s death greatly exaggerated” circulated widely. But the media’s self-conscious soul-searching aside, I wonder if there is something to the idea that vast swaths of the American public just want relief from irony. Not just from the narrowly defined kind of irony (cynical unseriousness) that Carter and Rosenblatt thought we should renounce, but from irony as a mode of thinking (a mode of reading, if you will) that recognizes the instability of language’s relationship to truth in all its comic and tragic possibilities.

In trying to explain why Brits believe Americans have no sense of irony, Zoe Williams writes (with tongue in cheek),

[America’s] is rather an optimistic culture, full of love of country and dewy-eyed self-belief and all the things that Europe's lost going through the war spindryer for the thousandth time. This is all faith-based - faith in God, faith in the goodness of humanity, etc - and irony can never coexist with faith, since the mere act of questioning causes the faith fairy to disappear.

To take this claim seriously for a moment, are faith and irony necessarily mutually exclusive? Is irony necessarily rooted in pessimism? Literary scholar Linda Hutcheon writes in a useful on-line essay that irony and nostalgia are not qualities that inhere in things, but rather subjective responses to perceived disjunctions between things (appearance and reality, past and present, etc.):

What irony and nostalgia share, therefore, is a perhaps unexpected twin evocation of both affect and agency--or, emotion and politics. . . . In both cases, it is the element of response--of active participation, both intellectual and affective--that makes for the power.

She points out that such modes of response are “transideological,” and can be evoked in the service of a spectrum of political aims and ideals.

I don’t know if this helps me understand the kids who embrace the ethos of West Point or anyone else who seeks out the irony-free zones of our political and cultural landscape. But my own faith lies with irony—its capacity to unsettle dangerous certainties, to dispute literal meaning as the only or true meaning. And frankly, it’s a great relief these days to turn to ironic humor (The Daily Show, The Onion) as a way to restore optimism (the feeling of a shared subjective response can be heartening). And while I don’t think irony is an endangered species, neither does it seem that we—those of us who subscribe to both irony and idealism—can take for granted irony’s cultural value as a critical mode or take lightly others’ relief in relinquishing the burden of doubt.

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