No Kidding: Does Irony Illuminate Or Corrupt?
In this piece, dated August 5, 2000, Charles McGrath explores this question. He notes from the outset:
One person who was glad when "Seinfeld" ended was Jedediah Purdy. He is also, no doubt, eagerly awaiting Bart Simpson's retirement. Mr. Purdy is the home-schooled West Virginia wunderkind who last year, at the age of 25, published "For Common Things," an earnest, impassioned homily that urged us to rediscover civic virtue, both in government and in our private lives, and that blamed for our current malaise nothing less than irony itself.
Irony, he wrote, is a corrosive, world-weary habit of mind, "a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation, or the truth of speech -- especially earnest speech." He singled out Jerry Seinfeld, "irony incarnate," as a symbol of all that is wrong with our culture, but he could have just as easily chosen Bart or, for that matter, Dave Eggers.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, but could he have also chosen Congressman Tom Feeney who Represents Florida's 24 District?
The Brad Blog does the heavy lifting in Tom Feeney - In his own words. Brad Friedman failed to see the irony in "In his own words", pointing out such failures along the way, or does he?
In the "Tom Feeney - In his own words" section of his official U.S. House of Representatives website page, Mr. Feeney (R-FL) reposts an Op-Ed he penned for the Orlando Sentinel --
apparently not ironically [my bold, henceforth; Friedman's italics] -- entitled "FLORIDA GETS IT RIGHT ON ELECTIONS".
The Op-Ed was published --
apparently not ironically -- on April 1, 2004 (April Fools Day).
In the piece, Mr. Feeney offers some well-informed opinions of the "unnecessary and devisive", "destructive lawsuits" challenging Florida's voting system by "vocal naysayers, who for partisan reasons are doing their best to portray the Sunshine State's voting technologies in a negative light."
The entire piece is certainly worth a read in full! If only for so many such --
apparently not ironic -- turns of phrase!
But then Mr. Friedman gives us a change in style and offers "two -- not ironic at all -- passages which, for some reason, leapt out at us this evening." So does this mean "apparently not ironically" is indeed the ironic?
Can the McGrath piece "illuminate"?
It depends, in part, on what you mean by irony, which has become a critical term of nearly infinite elasticity. We use it all the time (especially in the adverbial form) to refer to strange or untoward coincidence, as in, "Ironically, just hours after rescuing the cat from a tree, Jedediah ran over it by mistake in the pickup."
Or we use it, as counseled by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, among other authorities, chiefly to indicate sarcasm, as in, "Dave looked down at the mangled, lifeless feline. 'Nice cat,' he said ironically." (As the Times manual wisely points out, if the sarcasm is effective, the adverb is often unncessary.)
Etymologically, irony comes from the Greek word for dissembling, and the ancient Greeks used it in reference to that abiding preoccupation of theirs, the gap between appearance and reality, or between truth and belief. What interested them most was dramatic irony, which is what occurs when the reader or the audience knows something that a character doesn't (Oedipus was the favorite example); far from being funny, this was for the Greeks the stuff of tragedy.
...
But irony in Mr. Purdy's sense is something different -- less a way of conveying hidden meaning than of undermining meaning altogether. Irony for him is an attitude -- a bad attitude. And Mr. Purdy is right in suggesting that this particular kind of attitude has its roots in television and in the political disillusionment of the 1960's. (Though he doesn't say so, a telling early example of the Purdy-Eggers split manifested itself during the 1969 trial of the Chicago Eight. The Jedediahs -- Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis -- wanted a serious debate on the nature of civil disobedience; the Daves -- Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin -- wanted to make fun of the entire proceeding.)
Fast forward to 2004, would Jedediah Purdy say of the Tom Feeney piece that it is the sort of "irony [that] leads to alienation?