This weekend the wife made Bisquick pancakes, as she’s won to do on weekend afternoons. Upon returning from the kitchen I said, “Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it.”
Now what — if anything — is ironic in my statement above? Perhaps I’m being sincere, and attempts to assign irony only smack of cynicism. (I am a sucker for dairy.) Or perhaps I’m being sarcastic, actually saying that everything’s worse with Blue Bonnet on it. (I can be a bit of a shit.) Maybe there was just a Blue Bonnet commercial on TV, and I am mimicking it to be cute. Or perhaps my mimickry is intended to mock the fake sincerity of the characters in TV commercials — Blue Bonnet being a convenient lever.
The Guardian Unlimited has a lovely piece by Zoe Williams on what irony is and what irony isn’t. Halfway through she provides this handly — if thick — little summary of the article:
Most pressingly, though, there are a number of misconceptions about irony that are peculiar to recent times. The first is that September 11 spelled the end of irony. The second is that the end of irony would be the one good thing to come out of September 11. The third is that irony characterises our age to a greater degree than it has done any other. The fourth is that Americans can’t do irony, and we can. The fifth is that the Germans can’t do irony, either (and we still can). The sixth is that irony and cynicism are interchangeable. The seventh is that it’s a mistake to attempt irony in emails and text messages, even while irony characterises our age, and so do emails. And the eighth is that “post-ironic” is an acceptable term — it is very modish to use this, as if to suggest one of three things: i) that irony has ended; ii) that postmodernism and irony are interchangeable, and can be conflated into one handy word; or iii) that we are more ironic than we used to be, and therefore need to add a prefix suggesting even greater ironic distance than irony on its own can supply. None of these things is true.
Got that? Yeah, I had to read the whole article too.
Long story short? Irony is not dead. Even Jedediah Purdy — once hailed as the vanguard of the unironic — had to admit that irony has its place. I take Purdy’s lecture to be admission that he was merely (over)reacting to a cheap irony, a poser’s irony that only upper-middle class twenty-somethings can afford. When it comes to social critique, irony is indispensible. After all, the Hebrew prophets invented and perfected irony. They even got in an early dig at Nike.
Nothing is ironic without the messy inclusion of a troublesome remainder, either unexpected or unaccounted for. For the Hebrew prophets the remainder was the realization of egregrious social injustice coupled with the realizable call for Israel to stay true to its covenant with Yhwh. Noting some incident we’d be inclined to call cosmic irony — say, the classic question of how a good god can allow evil things to happen to good people — cannot be cosmically ironic without the cosmic — say, widespread belief in a God™ who is both all-loving and all-powerful. (You could say that theodicy is the nothing more than the un-ironic study of cosmic irony.)
Situational irony presupposes some or another expected narrative,* which is then inverted to turn against itself. Williams provides this helpful example:
For instance, if I was having a party, and I thought my dad was going to come, and he didn’t, that wouldn’t be ironic. If, on the other hand, I was having a party and I didn’t want my dad to come, and I spent three weeks working on a brilliant cover story for why he couldn’t come, and then my sister accidentally blew my cover, so I had to invite him anyway, and then, on the way here, he got run over and died – that’s ironic.
The irony that I am interested in is lifestyle irony. It’s what Nicholas of Cusa called coincidentia oppositorum — that is, a” co-incident of opposites” — or what Jim Fowler calls conjuctive faith. Not usually seen before middle age, conjunctive faith is faith marked by unavoidable irony.
In the transition to the Conjunctive stage one begins to make peace with the tension arising from the realization that truth must be approached from a number of different directions and angles of vision. Faith must learn to maintain the tensions between these multiple perspectives, refusing to collapse them in one direction or another. In this sense, faith must begin to come to terms with indissoluble paradoxes: the strength found in apparent weakness; the leadership that is possible from the margins of societies and groups but not from the center; the immanence and the transcendence of God [sic]. Conjunctive faith exhibits a kind of epistemological humility. The realities that religious rituals, symbols, and metaphors seek to bring into our reach spill over in excess and recede behind them in simultaneous disclosure and concealment.
Lifestyle irony tries to live betwixt and between these contradictions, especially the contradictions that arise when we try to match our sacred stories up against real life. As often as not, one plays square peg to the other’s round whole. Yet sometimes the two do fit, and that unexpected grace prevents us from fully entering disbelief.
The lifestyle ironist is troubled and delighted by this jarring montage. This morning she hates the unresolvable injustice of cosmic ironies. This afternoon, a situational irony brings her laughter. Tomorrow she uses irony to expose injustice. Without irony her world would cease to have any orientation, any meaning–even if they are tricky truths in a tricky universe. She loves her Trickster. She despises him. She respects him. She expects him. She tries to avoid him. Sometimes she even imitates him –sometimes getting caught, sometimes getting away with it all. But above all she trusts, trusts that Trickster will be there, whether she wants him there or not.
* If it’s a sacred narrative, it’s going to push us over into cosmic irony.
