Irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit āI donāt really mean what Iām saying.ā So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That itās impossible to mean what you say?ā¦ Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
This is why our educated teleholic friendsā use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic. And this is why the fiction-writing citizen of our televised culture is in such very deep shit. What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is a second answer to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves to thwart.
ā¦
Itās entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. Fictionās possibilities. The next real literary ārebelsā in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschews self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe thatāll be the point. Maybe thatās why they will be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Todayās risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the āOh how banal.ā To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Or overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.
Most satire mocks not honest sentiment but pretension, people who think themselves above the common herd. Ā Bursting the bubble of those with delusions of grandeur and revealling their cravenness is a rebellious act.
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