Forget Joan Didion, ask the Delphic oracle instead
Oh gee – there might be an irony gap developing. How horrifying, how shocking, how alarming.
Its ill health was noted by, among others, no less an ironist than Joan Didion, the nation’s poet laureate of disillusion. The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Ms. Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an “irony-free zone,” a vast Kool-Aid tank where “naïveté, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in” and where “innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.”
Did she. Well that strikes me as quite a stupid thing to say. Is that ironic?
But Ms. Didion might be on to something. A Nexis search found that the incidence of the words “irony,” “ironic” and “ironically” in major American newspapers during the two-week period beginning Nov. 6 slipped 19 percent from the same period last year.
Really? Well hooray – there is nothing more unironic than constantly belaboring the notion of irony. Irony turns deadly earnest the instant you lay claim to it.
Some sometime cynics bristled at the suggestion that they had gone soft or lost their edge. “To me, it’s a false choice to say we’re either going to be running our own little ‘Daily Show’ of the mind 24/7 or we’re going to be completely earnest,” said Kurt Andersen…“One can maintain one’s ironic armor and arsenal where one needs it.”
Well quite. One can be not particularly ‘ironic’ about Obama without being earnest or literal or flat-footed about everything. Does anyone – even Joan Didion – really need to be told this?
But it is at times like these, Ms. Didion seemed to argue, when a distanced perspective is needed most. (Not that she was willing to elaborate on her talk. “Basically,” she said on the phone Tuesday, “I don’t like to talk about anything I’ve written or that I’m writing. What you write down, there it is and you’ve done it.”)
Could that be because it doesn’t mean anything? How ‘ironic’ is Joan Didion anyway? What does it mean to call her ironic? Is there any substance to anything she says or is it just style, just a tic, just an attitude, just a get-me-I’m-hip pose? Is there less there than meets the eye? In other words could it be that she was not willing to elaborate on her talk because she was not able to, because it was just some word-spinning as opposed to an actual thought or argument? I think it could. And I say that without a trace of irony.
Of course, when one aims for irony, one sometimes misses and hits sarcasm instead. Now there’s a commodity never in short supply.
Personally, like the editor at ALD, and as an historian, I’m more worried about the decline of ‘went’… Is the past tense doomed? Has retrospection had its chips? Do you want fries with that?
Well see that’s just because people now say ‘goed’ instead of ‘went’ – irregular verbs are elitist.
Is that irony? Sarcasm? Zany madcap humour? I forget.
Maybe its being used in new speech forms: “So like, OB went ‘I don’t THINK so’ then the idiot goes ‘Yeah ‘s true mate!'”
The ‘irony’ used for a distancing perspective in writing about a politician, is framing stories to suit fashion. It was fashionable to respond to Bush with deep cynicism and flat disbelief; now its fashionable to respond to Obama with wide-eyed unframed expectation and think of it as ‘hope’.
Journalists and political comedians are working in a new paradigm, a holiday from distrust, and I hope it will break down into constructive honesty instead the last eight years of fashionable sarcasm.
Example:
KURTZ: All right. The word on the street is that comedians are kind of shying away from making fun of Obama. Are you man enough to do it?
KINDLER: No. I don’t want to make fun of him. That’s the thing. You can’t just decide — I don’t believe in the equal opportunity comedy where you — I give it to the left and I give it to the right. I like having a point of view. I don’t like to say left, because I don’t even know what that means. But I wanted Obama to win. So I can’t now pretend and try to find stuff about him.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0811/23/rs.01.html
No – this isn’t a left-right thing. This is the difference between blatant lack of qualification, and the opposite. It’s not political. If the politics were reversed I would loathe Bush and have a huge amount of respect for Obama even if I disagreed with him on the substance. (And I do disagree with him on some things now.)
No, the trouble here is that Bush really is a joke, and Obama isn’t. That just does change the way jokes work.
Yes, you are right.
Sarcasm is gratis, irony has to be earned. Obama has not yet done anything to earn irony.
The last eight years have pretty much maxed out my sarcasm-meter. I don’t think I can detect irony any more. I may have to get out some old Billy Connolly tapes and re-calibrate.
I’m pretty sure irony is alive and well, perhaps resting, and is not dead yet. Joan Didion, on the other hand. . .
Further, what the hell kind of snappish crap is this: “What you write down, there it is and you’ve done it.” So, there is no obligation to explain oneself when one’s comment requires further explanation? I wouldn’t accept that from a 12th grader.
Also, while I’m not accepting things from students, the research method for documenting the decline of “irony” tells us not a thing about the decline of irony. It tells us instead something about diction and usage. Also that the investigators didn’t think through the enactment of irony. The best irony of course does not announce itself by using the word “irony.” It just goes ahead and is ironic. What a silly waste of time. I wouldn’t accept that from an 11th grader.
Exactly.
I think the snappish crap about once you’ve written it it’s done and I’m not going to talk about it, is the sad consequence of being taken way too seriously. Didion has always been taken way too seriously. She’s not writing common or garden scholarship or research or journalism or popularization, you see, she’s writing ‘literature’ – and therefore her moody little essays are treated with great reverence, and she learns to treat herself the same way. What she writes or says is Art, and therefore it is what it is, it cannot be questioned or explained, it lives in another realm with the fairies and the epiphanies and the perfect sentences.
That’s absolute bullshit, in my view. She writes essays, and they’re no more sacred than any other kind of writing.
Cough. Excuse me. It’s just that I hate the self-importance and I Am Specialness of a lot of literary’ writers.
‘literary’