Thursday, May 31, 2007
Isn't It Ironic?
Today's topic is irony. I'm probably going to look back on this and regret I wrote it.
Mrs. Mentok is going to either love or hate this topic. My beloved wife is a teacher-librarian and far, far more literate than I. She regularly comes home from the library with boxfuls of books for her personal reading and seems to inhale them at an alarming rate. But, as husbands are wont to do, I still make the mistake of thinking I know more than her on certain subjects.
We've had a long-standing "disagreement" about the definition of irony (by "disagreement", I mean one of those silly recurrent husband-wife issues that sometimes descends into outrageous shouting matches and lengthy cold-shoulder treatments).
Mrs. M holds to the widespread, accepted view that "ironic", when applied to real-life situations, essentially means something coincidental or unexpected. Indeed, there are dictionaries and reference works that support her view.
I take the snobby view that irony is much subtler and must, in one way or other, relate to the ancient Greek dramatic device, namely that the audience must know more about a situation than the characters e.g. Oedipus Rex, where the audience knows he's marrying his mom and he doesn't.
I've been doing more thinking on the subject of irony lately because, at work, I'm tied up with this gigantic research/writing project. Basically, I have to absorb over 1,000 pages of technical documents, find the "logic thread" running through them and then summarize everything intelligibly in 20 pages. It's pretty stressful.
I'm leaning on an old professional trick of mine to see me through. I've always maintained that the trick to non-fiction writing is to find the fiction underneath it. Put another way: the point of fiction writing is to convince the audience that a made-up story might have actually happened; the point of non-fiction writing is to convince the audience that something that actually happened is a good story.
This is sometimes difficult, because ordinary human life and experience runs exactly opposite to the direction of story-telling. When we live our lives, we are constantly thinking about the future and planning how to get to an uncertain goal. In story-telling, we are looking backward and the goal is already certain, yet we must convince the audience that it is not.
In other words, as I see it, all non-fiction writing is essentially an exercise in irony. You must present the past as though it was a path of destiny and make the result sound inevitable.
For example, look at my story about my trip to Scotland, a story I've told a million times. When I get to the part where I say to the pub patrons that I think the UK should have a federal system, I have to convey my own fear and uncertainty at the time when the room suddenly went silent. I have to use dramatic technique to convince the audience that I don't know what's coming next, even though it was my own experience.
I don't know why this obsesses me so. I guess I'm driven by the view that mastering irony at its most subtle level is essential to mastering story-telling, fiction and non-fiction. So I continue to pursue it ... like a deer in the woods ... purely for professional reasons, you understand.
Help me out here. How do you see irony? Describe some situations you have found ironic.
Labels: The first person to mention Alanis Morissette will be shot...
posted by Mentok @ 11:45 p.m.,
11 Comments:
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At 8:26 a.m.,
FiL said...
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I'm with you, Mentok. Properly deployed, irony relates to the difference between someone's perceptions/actions and reality (sidebar: don't go getting all buddhist on my ass, or else this conversation is over), either as understood by outside viewers or, in their absence, as subsequently realized by the protagonist.
But of course there's the argument that the usage of the word to mean incongruous or coincidental is plain linguistic evolution, even if it originates from initial misuse of the term.
Next up: Xeno's paradox. -
At 9:43 a.m.,
Mentok said...
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Yes, but I've been down that road before with Mrs. M. The problem lies in the second part: "the difference between someone's perceptions and reality ... as subsequently realized by the protagonist."
Mrs. M argues that, linguistic evolution aside, this provision in the classic definition of irony specifically covers coincidental situations. If you decide to go for a smoke break then subsequently encounter a no-smoking sign, or go looking a knife in a facility that contains only approx. 10,000 spoons ... well those situations represent a difference between perception and reality, don't they?
I continue to reject coincidence-based interpretations of irony, as much from an editorial standpoint as anything else. There's already a word for coincidence....use it!
Instead, I've tried to hang my hat on the definition of irony that focuses on human hubris i.e. presuming to know more or have more control over a situation than you actually do e.g. the tax accountant jailed for tax evasion.
However, that interpretation heads down the slippery slope of meaning the same as hypocrisy, and that's not a proper interpretation either.
She's a slippery eel, this irony, and one with many tentacles, eh Fil? ;-) -
At 12:05 p.m.,
FiL said...
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Arrr, indeed she is! Now where's the cabin boy??
P.S. A Dearest Friend wrote an entire PhD thesis on irony, and spent a thick chapter or two tackling this very question... -
At 5:19 p.m.,
Mentok said...
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It says a great deal about your qualities as a friend that, apparently, you actually read your friend's Ph.D. thesis. I always thought theses were meant to be used as insulation for the walls of university buildings, not for actual reading ;-)
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At 7:35 p.m.,
FiL said...
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Alanis Morissette...
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At 10:56 p.m.,
Mentok said...
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Shooting is too good for you, so I have devised a more terrible punishment:
"Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl
With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there
She would merengue and do the cha-cha
And while she tried to be a star, Tony always tended bar
Across a crowded floor, they worked from 8 till 4
They were young and they had each other
Who could ask for more?
At the Copa (CO!), Copacabana (Copacabana)
The hottest spot north of Havana (here)
At the Copa (CO!), Copacabana
Music and passion were always the fashion
At the Copa....they fell in love
(Copa Copacabana)
His name was Rico, he wore a diamond
He was escorted to his chair, he saw Lola dancin' there
And when she finished, he called her over
But Rico went a bit too far, Tony sailed across the bar
And then the punches flew and chairs were smashed in two
There was blood and a single gun shot
But just who shot who?" -
At 8:40 a.m.,
adam said...
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As a literary device irony is about the difference between literal and metaphorical meanings - about oppositions between denotation and connotations. There's a good bit in 'Reality Bites' (actually there's lots of good bits in Reality Bites but...) where Noni's character is asked what Irony means in her job interview at a newspaper and hasn't got a clue, and moans about it to Ethan Hawke who immediately says 'It's where your inteded meaning is the opposite of the actual meaning' and that's a pretty good way of thinking about it too. It extends to dramatic critism as you've already said as a difference between what we know and what they know. And at the risk of god knows what might come next, there's a stand up routine somewhere (dylan moran, possibly) about how it's quite ironic that somebody can sing about irony without knowing what 'irony' means. Shoot me.
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At 3:29 a.m.,
adam said...
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And the other thing, which was dragging on my mind overnight, is that 'irony' is the great escape of the unimaginative and uninformed. You know what mate, you weren't 'being ironic', you were 'getting it wrong', and as for you, you weren't 'being ironic' either, you were 'being an arrogant sexist dickhead'. Just accept it.
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At 3:30 a.m.,
adam said...
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That's imaginary correspondents, obviously, not you two.
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At 9:40 a.m.,
Mentok said...
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Hee hee! I love how people (myself included) can get so cranked up about this topic. You don't see people getting passionate about the definition of similies, do you?
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At 12:15 p.m.,
Library Mama said...
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No, but some of us get worked up about the spelling of similes.
;-)
