Conventional wisdom has it that irony had been on the ropes for several years before calamity felled it for good.
In 1999, when then-recent Harvard graduate Jedediah Purdy published For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, he struck a chord in a tone poem whose noble theme had swollen through the previous decade. Why, we had a First Lady openly advocate spiritual seriousness in public life. All through the 1990s, we heard of a return of sincerity and good-heartedness answering the Darwinian excesses of the 1980s. Collegians forsook fortune to teach in Appalachian schools, doctors quit lucrative practices to minister to the poor. And Purdy echoed a recurring motif, the Seinfeld backlash, which found the sitcom's cynical characters symptomatic of societal insincerity.
Critics blasted Purdy for being young and idealistic. "...[I]t is impossible in reading his book not to be reminded again and again that one is in the presence of a very young man and intellectually a very immature one," Wilfred M. McClay wrote in Commentary. This typified the response from the right, which already had made its accommodation with the vast swath of America that did not watch Seinfeld, and which suffered not the torment of cynicism. The pious and sentimental would make their presence felt in 2000 but after 2001 they would dominate debate in a country gripped by The New Sincerity.
Purdy's crisis, then, was one of the left, whose centrists saw that savoring the ironies of life was at best poor electoral strategy. When Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed during Senate testimony in December, 2001, that criticism might "give ammunition to America's enemies," anyone with a sense of irony had to figure it was, as Time had declared, dead.
"One good thing could come from this horror," Roger Rosenblatt earnestly aspired in the newsweekly's September 24, 2001 edition. "It could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years—roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright—the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real. With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes—our columnists and pop-culture makers—declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life."
Rosenblatt's diagnosis, in an appropriately Twainian twist, proved premature. But before we dismiss it we might ask what he and new-era proclaimers thought they were dethroning. Irony has a long history, back beyond Socrates' loaded questions, and a venerable one as a literary device. But it became a modern coping mechanism after the First World War crushed, for anyone with intelligence, any possibility of buying into the high-minded ideals of a world ruled by kings and kaisers.
Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory detailed how British soldier-writers fostered a culture of ironic detachment. Fussell, too, learned the hard way, as an infantry lieutenant in World War II, weighing propaganda films and posters against the ghoulish reality of unredeemed death. That "giggle and smirk" that so troubled Rosenblatt was the thinking person's bemused recognition that all rulers, whether appointed divinely or judicially, preside by insincerity masked as its opposite.
If a double negative is a positive, then irony ironized must yield something like reality. This is understood instinctively by viewers of The Daily Show and its spin-off, The Colbert Report, both of which spoof "serious" news programs. Both also provide a dose of perspective to a growing, mostly young audience. Some argue that the mainstream news media, in its Fox-cowed quest to be "fair and balanced," treat spin and reality as equally meritorious, thus driving millions to the ironic stylings of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
Meanwhile, the Whitney Biennial is back, its antinomian verve restored. Michael Kimmelman notes in The New York Times that the last biennial, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, was "ingratiating, an upbeat truce. But the show that opened a week ago brims with collectives making sometimes clever, sometimes strident political points. But this return to irony has a market component, as wise money realized the pretty-fluff market was overvalued. Thus, a "collective and downtown gallery ... now has something of the celebrity and success it ostensibly critiques."
Even irony gets ironized. With presidential approval ratings in the chilly 30s, we might assume it has fully recovered. But it might be a species of irony-lite that has returned, one that simply pokes instead of skewering. Bryan Curtis hinted at it in Slate recently, noting the resurgence of VH1, which found its "voice" ironizing pop-culture. "It is the kind of voice that would thoroughly dismantle a Madonna video, pointing out the gratuitous excess and the cheesiness of the mise-en-scène, before admitting, 'But wasn't it great?'"
Yeah. Isn't it?
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.