Engagement and the End of Irony

Reading the biography of the late novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace makes me think about engagement in a way that I don’t think I had entertained before. Wallace was one of the most renowned writers of recent times, praised for his fiction and nonfiction alike.  The more he wrote and the more he absorbed the dominant literacy themes of his time, the more he grew dissatisfied with the emphasis on irony and critical distance that seemed to characterize so many of his contemporaries. For Wallace, irony has always been a valuable way to speak truth to power and to communicate with the public employing a wry, humorous, all-knowing-as-in-hip edge. But he also recognized the problem of relying too heavily on irony and critical distance, and sought to deemphasize them by attempting to chart the territory of what some at that time referred to as the “New Sincerity.”

According to the account offered by Wallace, irony can be amusing and diverting and obviously has its uses as an indirect and often oblique take on an all too greedy and meretricious world. But irony's harping on the negative, on the things that are wrong versus the ways to set things right can be grating. And, as a result, it becomes incredibly toothless as a strategy for envisioning a better, less oppressive world. In fact, Wallace makes the interesting point that unrelenting irony has a way of tyrannizing us, of evading responsibility for analyzing the problem and actually coming up with real solutions. Irony returns us in an almost endless loop of critique to the conditions of our demise, unable and perhaps even stubbornly unwilling to explore a route to positive changes.

Much of his critique of irony occurs in an essay on television and its relationship to contemporary fiction, and as he notes in the course of this essay, it is not surprising irony would become a default mode for many writers, as so much of TV is so centrally about fantasy and so desperately removed from real people and real problems. But Wallace also concludes that any movement to transcend irony and the tendency to be hip above all must also be willing to risk disapproval. Which, after all, is what real rebels, or, if you will, what real activists do. They risk disapproval, boldly and knowingly. They take on the powers that be directly and conscientiously and attempt to show how things could be different. They not only show how things could be different, they give us a taste through their actions how it will be different. In short, they become engaged people who write and take action to promote the public good. They seek to create a more caring, inclusive and genuinely effectual society in which, at the very least, hunger and poverty simply have no place. Such a goal can be broached ironically, but the follow through must ultimately put the childishness of irony aside so that serious and sustained civic engagement can occur.