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.,
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