escaping the irony trap
reflections on a modern temptation with an assist from david james duncan
Several years ago, I came to a despairing revelation: much of my life and energy had been dispelled and disemboweled by an ironic, cynical distance from what I actually believed and hoped for this world. I was protecting myself from genuine belief and genuine hopefulness in a sheath of irony. It felt safe in there.
One of my best friends—a former boss, current colleague, traveling companion, inimitable conversationalist, and genuine, unironic (in the best way possible) man—challenged me on this incessantly. He told me that my cynicism was not actually reflective of who I was. He had heard me talk to my children too often, heard the love in my voice for people, to be fooled by the ironic detachment I faked from time to time. He told me, basically, to get over it.
And yet, try as I have for the past 7-8 years to detach myself from my detachment, enslavement to irony dies hard. Take even the name of this newsletter: Raising Dragonslayers (!). Really? Every cynical, ironic molecule in me shudders at the name. Here is what I wrote when I first thought of the name for this blog:
As a bit of a side note, I should mention that I also picked this specific name because I am trying to be less ironic about things than I have tended to be in the past. I don’t know whether it is disposition or simply long habit (the two get tougher to distinguish as you get older), but I have become pretty cynical as I get older. A phrase like “slaying dragons” can sound so cutesy and over-the-top that my first impulse is to mock it. Okay, sure, suburban dad, go slay some dragons. And I get it. Feel free to mock if you are so inclined. I am just tired of living that way. I want to be serious, productive, and courageous and cynicism shortcuts all three of those qualities. So, to fully embrace my openness to mockery, perhaps the first dragon I need to slay is the one of cynicism and ironic scoffing that prevents me from taking a stand. Die, dragon.
In his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman characterizes irony as a component of the “deathworks” of modern culture. He defines a deathwork as follows:
An all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture. Every deathwork represents an admiring final assault on the objects of its admiration: the sacred orders of which their arts are some expression in the repressive mode.
Irony qualifies because it disparages admiration. Irony encourages us to dismiss, to laugh, to sneer at what others believe. It promises protection but, taken to extremes, leads to death.
When I was in Rome last year, I attended a church service in an ancient building with believers from all over the world. As I sang worship songs I knew in English in Italian, the Lord began to work anew on my cynicism. I wrote the following in an ongoing letter to my oldest son that night:
The truth is, I love this world. I love the work I have been given to do. I love my family and my students and my church. I have been blessed beyond reckoning, even in the hard things that have happened to me. I hate how often I have chased after the cheap applause that accompanies the even cheaper cynicism.
We got back to our convent and I told just that to these kids I have spent the past four years teaching. I confessed to my cynicism and pleaded with them to not waste time following that siren song. I repented of leading them to judgment rather than grace and beauty.
Of course, God is good and the story isn’t so one-sided. However, I wanted them to know that the best part of me is the passionate part, the one in love with a God who somehow loved me. The part that sneers and dismisses and doubts could learn a lot from the better part. I hope that part gets more screentime in the years to come.
This is all a prelude to a lengthy quote from David James Duncan’s latest novel, Sun House. An earlier novel by Duncan, The Brothers K, is one of my favorite novels of all time. Sun House will not share that lofty perch though I do enjoy it and have learned from it. The passage I am about to quote is a short monologue from one of the book’s main characters, Risa. In the scene I am quoting, Risa is a graduate seminar at an art school. As a survivor of English graduate school, the passage hit home. Risa complains about the distance so many of her peers put between their artistic creations and genuine belief, the kind that makes transcendent art possible. She makes the following argument about irony:
Nonstop irony is a vicious cycle. People think irony expresses some sort of truth. The truth is, most irony is just a verbal trick that swizzles disingenuous words around to convey ridicule, contempt, or caustic humor that makes us sound knowing at the very instant we’re saying nothing true at all. Irony can’t convey truth for a simple reason: it never means what it says. But for the same reasons, thank heavens, it can’t invalidate truth. Irony pretends to invalidate things by sounding snarky or snide about them, but if being snide and snarky had that power, Saturday Night Live would have invalidated North American by now. I love SNL, by the way. Ironic humor relieves tension by treating what hurts as a joke. But when we equate irony and truth, some super weird stuff happens. Like, it suddenly feels uncool, or naive, or even wrong to sincerely believe in anything. Several ironists I’ve known say, ‘There’s nothing left to believe in.’ But that saying is a belief. That’s knee-jerk relativism posing as an absolute! And many an ironist holds that pose so fiercely they end up trivializing every moment of their life with pride, as if the insincere trivializing of all things is a triumph.
The character goes on to describe irony as “spreading unmeaning.” She finds it inimical to art. True art must emanate from belief, not disparagement. I apologize for the profanity in the following image, but it encapsulates so much of why modern art is dispiriting and depressing.
There is a fake and self-satisfied effort amongst artists to “speak truth to power” that still, somehow, depends on public beneficence. It says nothing. It cuts down. It destroys. It does this because, as the professor in Sun House responds, “If we’re guided by those irony-proof idiots in our hearts, no corporate power can control our art. Irony treated as an absolute, in reflection as in art. . . is pathological.” This is not to say, of course, that irony has no place whatsoever. For sure, it does. It sometimes helps us to laugh when we would otherwise cry. However, it cannot be the dominant expression of our attitude toward the world. We must love. We must be animated by a positive vision.
As I think about my task, my vocation in this life, I want to be reminded of this truth all of the time. My purpose in life is to pass on hope to the next generation of Christian men and women (including the ones living under my roof). I have marvels to pass on, wonders to share, works of God to commend. God forbid (literally) that I fail in this task because of some navel-gazing desire to be ironic and cool and distant. We need to believe—deeply, wholeheartedly—that this world is a hopeful place, that “though the black lights off the black West went/ Oh, morning, at the brown bring eastward spring—/Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” Grace is here. Grace is coming. Let us be its heralds.