by Matthew Pertz, News Editor
The late author David Foster Wallace said in a 1997 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, “Irony and sarcasm and all that stuff are fantastic for exploding hypocrisy and exposing what’s wrong in extent values. As far as I can see, they’re notably less good at erecting replacement values or coming any closer to the truth.”
I’ve been reading much of Wallace’s work recently. He’s a fascinating creature; he rails against excessive irony, yet much of his work used it. In fact, he was a master of irony.
Take Wallace’s magnum opus, “Infinite Jest.” The novel is emblematic of Wallace’s point; the majority of its characters are substance-addicted, yet the one clean character is physically disabled, irony being found in his combination of mental freedom and physical bonds.
“We’re just still using [irony],” he said, “35, 40 years after it really had some use.”
Don’t see this as a contradiction in his work; in fact, it’s entirely consistent with what he believes. Wallace knows antiphrasis is a toxic trope, and yet he still gushes it because of his audience.
(Pay attention, here’s the thesis.)
Our generation – either late millennial or early Gen Z, depending on your definitions – is pockmarked by depressive and anxious traits like no generation before it, and much of it is traceable to the past 50 years of refracting reality through a disingenuous lens.
A culture of contempt, slammed past sixth gear, is altering the shape of our world. We’ve lost the ability to define ourselves in our own terms, instead only learning what is by what isn’t – the irony here being that this leaves the most socially connected generation feeling the most alone. Wallace himself called it “E Unibus Pluram”: out of one, many. We will be, by any meaningful measure, smarter, wealthier and more successful than our parents. Yet we still feel like this place is not for us.
So our default lexicon drips falsehoods. We can’t even admit how we’re doing – today (Feb. 27, 2018) I lied to 22 people and told them I’m somewhere between good and alright, while I’m really much further on the dark end of the emotional spectrum. I’m sure some of them lied to me in the same way, reflexively. It’s not their fault.
These fibs are appealing to speakers and listeners alike – derision entertains without engaging. I can feel like I’m connecting without obliging myself to the commitment of emotional accountability.
We rarely even resort to the semantics of sincerity; “unironic” is the postmodern synonym. Last week, one of my friends said to me, “This pizza is unironically very good,” because the pizza’s goodness couldn’t be understood as individually echt, evidently.
But contrariness extends further than pizza because the ironic motif has replaced sincerity as our lens through which we interpret reality. We know friendship not by defining what a friend is but by feeling what a friend isn’t. We know love not by falling in it, but by correcting for who and what we don’t love. It’s the self-destructive appeal of a world we’ve decided is too incongruous for good faith.
Simply articulating this issue requires a level of mental acrobatics, because I can’t point out the issues in an ironic worldview without highlighting its irony. There’s not a quick fix, nor a soapbox which I can yell at some ambiguous cultural force. My only plea is that we all make an effort to live into all the genuineness Earth offers.
