The Ironist

October 5, 2008

[image by S. Casey] 

David Foster Wallace’s passing has spurred a lot of conversations that in one way or another invoke the idea of irony and his work’s relationship to it. Some of the arguments to be found in and around those discussions– and some of the hostility that DFW’s work drew from the beginning (not to mention a veritable murder of prescriptivists descending upon Alanis Morrissette like tweedy, elbow-patched crows on a field of green ESL learners)– comes from clear dissonance regarding what irony actually is and then proceeding to speak as if everyone involved is talking about the same thing at the same time.

Traditional definitions of irony generally mention four kinds of irony (verbal, tragic, dramatic, and situational) which I would recast into three categories:

• Simple irony includes most sarcasm and superficial satire and is generally invoked purposefully by the speaker (or other writer or artist– to keep things simple, for the moment, I’ll use the idea of speech in its broadest sense, to include all acts of expression). Examples abound in The Onion and The Simpsons (Comic book guy: Oh, a sarcasm detector. That’s a really useful invention!)
• Artistic irony includes tragic and dramatic irony and is really a description of position and viewpoint. In this context, irony is the state in which we– or some audience member/other knows something at least some of the participants or characters do not, creating humor, excitement, horror, dread, piquancy, etc. Oedipus the King is the classic example of artistic irony. Half the high school students in America at any moment are considering (or soon will be, or just completed) the artistic irony in Dimmesdale’s relationship with poor Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter."
• Philosophical or Living irony can be seen as a recognition of some of the many ways in which the human condition is an ironic position due to rhetorical doubt, contingency of meaning, and the demise of classic foundationalism. It is captured in the assumptions we make about meaning, the words we use, and the stories we tell ourselves and others with them.

In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty has provided the clearest definition of philosophical irony I am aware of, enlivened by the irony of the word "final" in this context. He writes (emphasis mine):

"The final vocabulary is the set of words we employ to justify our actions, beliefs, and lives. The words we use to tell– sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively– the story of our lives.

[...]

An ironist is someone who fulfills these three conditions:

1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people in books she has encountered.

2) She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither undermine nor dissolve these doubts.

3) Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself."

David Foster Wallace’s work undeniably made use of simple and artistic irony directly and in reference. Examples of simple irony are easily found across the spectrum of his work; amongst other antecedents, Infinite Jest plays heavily on Hamlet which is rife with artistic irony. But situated in the context of philosophical or living irony, the meaning of other kinds of irony is radically changed. Rather than being the product of an elitism in which the speaker elevates his greater acumen and understanding and his distance from the proceedings– making sport and making fun– simple irony takes on a richer set of hues: anguish at the position we are all in, commiseration with fellow sufferers, and a recognition that those who are aware of living irony often find it impossible to forget or ignore except willfully and incompletely for altogether too brief moments or through the incomprehensible luck of being blessed with faith. When Wallace delves into the psychology Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest he does not do so at the level of simple irony, dismissing it because of its arcane rules and reliance on faith, but ruefully, in the full light of being an ironist, recognizing the power of a faith he cannot possess (this is bolstered by the anonymous letter that almost all agree was written by Wallace about his stay at Granada House).

The philosophical danger of postmodernism is that it is endless: endlessly solipsistic and finally relativist. The specter of relativism is perhaps easier to handle if one isn’t engaged in the arts, where the relationship between relativism and aesthetics can leave the artist (and the lover of art) distinctly queasy and without the easiest recourses of pragmatism. But the solipsism is seemingly inescapable, a philosophical Pandora’s box that inhabits the soul. It can’t be ignored and it can’t be dispelled except through the very faith that irony directly undermines. And what most often comes of this knotted understanding isn’t just fright and unhappiness and confusion, but their infinitely larger, darker counterparts: dread and despair and confoundedness. Dread that eats at your stomach until everything inspires nausea and the taste of bile you come to crave; despair that has its seat in the deepest imagination, so that even the thought of escape brings fear; confoundedness that comes from knowing that you aren’t confused in your orientation to a world of sense, but that the world is inherently non-sensical.

I liken this position of the ironist to those who are afraid of heights. Acrophobics do not fear because they lack a grasp of physics or probability, but because, in a way that is deemed by those who do not suffer as irrational, they can’t stop thinking about the possibilities… they can’t help feeling like there is something deeply wrong inherent in their position vis a vis the rest of the world. Given the same experiences, some will be afraid of heights and some will not. Some will study philosophy or literature and easily shrug off post-structuralist theory and the contingency of meaning, others will find themselves haunted by it. Some can find a faith that shores them against the constant consideration of possibilities– in probabilities or religion– others have to learn to live with it. And in trying to live with it we can choose wilful ignorance, or we can go deep, try to make as much sense of what we can as we can. The latter is to deal as best we can with the constant bitter taste of sorrow and pain because the former– replacing that taste with sweetness, as a good friend of mine recently put it– doesn’t seem desirable and has, at any rate, proven impossible.

The product of this constant struggle informed the richness and love I found in David Foster Wallace’s work, a chord I instantly recognized in his work from beginning to end. The beautiful, fragile, terrifying, unfathomable workings of humanity were too much with him, from porn stars and their acolytes to those at a midwestern county fair, from mathematicians recapitulating infinities to the wraithing of our ghostly, ad-supported technologically mediated lives. Despite being an ironist, Wallace made some sense of the world in a way that made sense to– and of me. In some way knowing he was out there was a salve; that he finally succumbed to the same diseases of the psyche and the spirit was as vitally a wound. His passing won’t fade with the news cycle. His loss will not be replaced. What kind of irony is it that literally days before he killed himself, I wrote to a friend who had recently finished Infinite Jest at my behest and found it as powerful as I did to elaborate on the very things I’m talking about here?

A few days ago a colleague commented that my "first language is sarcasm." I retorted that she was wrong, my first language was actually irony. But she was right. I haven’t yet found a way to make the kind of sense David Foster Wallace made for me… I don’t possess his brilliance. My own many projects, large and small, intuitive and planned, have given me only the slightest, briefest glimpse of some way that I can put things together in a livable way and express myself in a way that might have meaning to others. I’m an ironist of the highest order in my skull, but the expression too easily finds its way out at the lowest level, a raging fire glimpsed only by its smallest flame. All we can do is keep going or not– keep inventing and reinforcing the meanings that help ourselves and others or not. The ironist is not to be belittled or felt sorry for, he just is. I’ve struggled with how to finish this post, concerned as it is with a topic that has no end except for (eventually) my own, when an email from the same friend I mentioned earlier came containing this thought, which is as true as it gets and as apt a description of where I find myself as any:

I hope it [an earlier message] meant that you’re getting some help with your depression. I hope you understood my response as I intended it - it doesn’t make it easier, but that doesn’t mean you don’t do it. As my favourite philosophy prof tried to explain it to us, that is the true post-modern condition. Not detached, distancing irony, but poetic, paradoxical, true irony; and you can either learn to savour the bittersweet taste or try to spit it out.

Tags: david foster wallace, irony, Psyche, reading, richard rorty