This week, I've started working on my dissertation--that is, doing writing that's meant as a very, very rough draft of what will eventually appear in the dissertation itself. This is how it began. At the bottom of the page, I've included a screenshot of how the website 750 Words assessed this, my first (in)direct stab at dissing.
What is irony? A stupid question if ever there was one, but perhaps the place where I have to begin. It is, after all, a Platonic question, and this chapter will eventually turn toward Socratic irony--which of course owes Plato much of its historical legacy. First, however, let's consider some alternate questions that might let us approach--even if we fail to meet--what has been called irony.
The Platonic character of "what is irony?" is tied to its presumption that irony has some essence, and that that essence has some sort of being one could gesture toward. Given the performative quality of irony, however, tying it to a constative meaning is difficult. Paul de Man points this out in "The Concept of Irony," discussing the trouble with trying to pin irony to a fixed definition. At the very least, a Platonic approach to irony would require the sort of interminable subdividing showcased in the Sophist: we would at least have to account for irony's "verbal," "tragic," "historical," and "situational" varieties.
But as any good sophist (though perhaps not Plato and Socrates, delinquent sophists that they were) knows, a situation and its kairos are a highly unstable things. And so what counts as "situational" irony might fluctuate based not only on such traditional rhetorical variables as "speaker" and "audience," but also on the workings of language itself--that "stealthy body"--as well as the broad historical, material, and cultural context in which a potentially ironic utterance attempts to coalesce.
To make things a bit more concrete, let's consider one of the 20th century's most popular questions about irony: "Isn't it ironic?" This question led in to the chorus of 1995's "Ironic," a pop tune by singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette. This Morissettean question might seem cannier than its Platonic relative, as if focuses on the a posteriori judgment of a single instance of irony (i.e. "it," the irony of which the preceding "isn't" renders at least rhetorically questionable). Instead of having to discover or invent universal qualities prescriptively applicable to all instances of irony, the question humbly limits itself to a tentative decision about a single example. Unfortunately for Generation X, the relative irony of the examples in "Ironic" became a surprisingly vexed question. The song became a topos for numerous arguments about what counts as ironic, evidenced in New York Times critic Jon Pareles' reference to "the unironic 'Ironic'" in his 2004 review of one of Morissette's subsequent albums. Let's consider the first verse of "Ironic":
An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
It's a black fly in your Chardonnay
It's a death row pardon two minutes too late
Isn't it ironic, don't you think
The song's examples of things that are "like" irony are things that would traditionally be judged as unfortunate turns of events, like tripping over or taking a bad trip on kairos. But if we want to attribute a degree of "the unexpected" to irony--the Oxford English Dictionary does, offering "[a] state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected" as one of irony's significations--it is questionable whether Morissette's examples are "ironic." Various tropes and turns of phrase in English, from the euphemism "fly in the ointment" to jokes about flies in one's soup, suggest that while a fly in a glass of wine might be unfortunate, it's far from uncommon or unexpected. In some ways, that pesky fly might even be paradigmatic, an insect that's been spoiling the finer things in life since the days of classical symposia. That's not to say this makes a fly in the wine essentially ironic, however, because that judgment would be dependent on millennia of accreted tropes and linguistic tics. One would also have to consider whether misfortune is expected or un-. An optimist might see Morissette's examples as ironically defying expectations (or maybe the fly would help the glass be more than half full), but a cynic might see the examples as eminently expected--further proof that Murphy's law truly does guide the universe.
So far, then, all I've managed is to set up two scapegoats, Plato and Alanis Morissette, two alazons who came at irony all wrong. But, as Avital Ronell and Paul de Man have argued, nothing puts one at the risk of ironic effacement like trying to be the eiron, trying to exert ironic authority or pronounce authoritatively on irony. If the efforts of Plato and Morisette didn't quite pan out, I have yet to do anything but rehearse both their efforts and the tired, programmatic responses of others.
