Sherry Chandler

Irony

I remember that almost immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, certain pundits declared the death of irony. Like Mark Twain, however, irony didn’t stay dead long. The irony in question was a sort of insider cynicism, as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it “An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning” or “A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect.”

I think this definition of irony is often confused with simple sarcasm: “A cutting, often ironic remark intended to wound. ” Not that sarcasm is all that simple. Because sarcasm depends on tone and timing, some types of brain injury destroy the ability to recognize it. And it most assuredly doesn’t work on children.

A second meaning of irony, much beloved of local newscasters, is “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.” “Ironically, Jane,” the remote newsman will intone in front of a burning house, “little Johnny’s toy fire truck was one of the things the Smith family managed to save.” This one drives me crazy because most of the time these guys are talking about a coincidence and not an irony. A coincidence is “A sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged.”

According to Wikipedia,

The American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel found it unacceptable to use the word ironic to describe mere unfortunate coincidences or surprising disappointments that “suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly.” This definition … excludes examples like “ironically, I encountered a traffic jam when I was already late,” as made popular by Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic”.

Lately, I’ve been reading in Northrop Fryes’ Anatomy of Criticism (Princton University Press, 1957). Frye discusses another kind of irony altogether: irony as a fictional mode. This type of irony approaches the Socratic, a form of understatement or feigned ignorance used for rhetorical purposes – the famous Socratic questioning – or the dramatic, in which there is a very important fact that the audience knows but the actors do not (as for example, that the man Oedipus killed at the crossroads was his father).

But Frye moves a bit beyond that in his discussion of irony. Frye finds irony in the very nature of the humanity itself:

…What happens to, say, the hero of Kafka’s Trial is not the result of what he has done, but the end of what he is, which is an “all too human” being. The archetype of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of death.

If irony is part of the human condition, then it will always be with us. Indeed, far from killing irony, I think the Bush years have given us a sort of irony on speed. Certainly, they’ve made Jon Stewart’s career.

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