[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]insiders, perhaps the odds would start to even out again, and maybe even
someday the outsiders we know and love would finally be able to break
free of the inner circle. To start the ball rolling, let s pay tribute to a few
notable insiders.
Insiders aren t always phonies, just as outsiders don t necessarily look
like James Dean. Take Mr. Pickwick, the affable and utterly genuine hero
of Dickens first novel. Unlike Groucho Marx, Mr. Pickwick never met a
group he wouldn t be proud to join. He is literature s ultimate hail-fellow-
well-met, and as such, he just naturally gravitates to the inside. He would
be pleased to share a grog with James Dean, but he certainly wouldn t
understand why the young fellow seemed so mopey. Mr. Pickwick is an
insider, yes, but he isn t Babbitt. If we can like Pickwick, we re on the road
to treating insiders with the same humanity we regularly afford outsiders.
For a different kind of insider, how about poor Stradlater, Holden s
roommate? I ve always felt Stradlater got a raw deal. Yes, he s not partic-
ularly sensitive, and, no, he doesn t much care who s a phony and who
isn t, but all in all, he s not a bad guy. I know that, in today s world, the
fact that you like sports and have a lot of friends is never going to win you
a starring role in a YA novel, but that doesn t mean we can t still feel a
42 BOOKS AND AUTHORS
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little sorry for Stradlater. He was playing by the rules and doing just fine
when a little runt in a funny hat who couldn t even hack it as the man-
ager of the fencing team somehow turned the world upside down. Isn t it
about time somebody writes Pitcher in the Rye, the story from Stradlater s
point of view?
The real problem at the heart of this inside-out mess is that, thanks
to literature and film, we all see ourselves as outsiders. Every success-
ful politician, no matter how different, spins himself as an outsider and
his opponent as an insider. No one willingly admits these days to being
an inside-the-Beltway person. We can thank everyone from Holden to
James Dean to Woody Allen for the popularity of the outsider, but unfor-
tunately, they ve all done their job too well. When being outside becomes
fashionable, the committed outsider faces a crisis of conscience. Look at
Woody Allen: he saw himself, the outsider as schlemiel, dangerously close
to becoming an insider, and, in a desperate move to get back on the out-
side, he was forced to fall in love with his stepdaughter. Woody s strategy
may be distasteful, but it s going to take his kind of courage if outsiders are
ever going to get back outside where they belong. Maybe then it will be
time to tackle the east-west thing.
Booklist, September 1, 2001
THE IRONY IN IRONY
WHEN I WAS A callow undergraduate, I took a class on Victorian po-
etry. It was the professor who piqued my interest. He had long hair, wore
paisley ties, and gave standing-room-only lectures on the meaning of the
Beatles lyrics. The class began not with Penny Lane, as I d hoped, but
with lectures on paisley-tie-guy s own personal literary theory. Imagine
my surprise when, after having scrupulously avoided any form of math-
ematics involving parentheses, I found my class notes covered with what
looked like algebraic formulas. The hip professor, it turned out, used for-
mulas to help define his four categories of literature tragedy, comedy,
romance, and irony. Tragedy (1/0=0/1) covered stories in which the hero s
life started out good and ended up bad (I m oversimplifying here, at a
distance of 40 years); comedy was the opposite (0/1=1/0), with the hero
BOOKS AND AUTHORS 43
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starting out bad and ending up good. In romance, the arc of the hero s
life started out good and ended up good (1/0=1/0), while the ironic life
started out bad and finished bad (0/1=0/1).
We worked our way through the Victorians, puzzling over which of
the formulas fit the poem at hand. My scores were hardly better than
they were when I was fumbling through eighth-grade algebra. I had the
most trouble with irony. The whole 0/1=0/1 business had me completely
baffled. This was a bitter blow because, like most wannabe intellectuals, I
considered myself a connoisseur of irony. Don t we all? Just as no one will
admit to not having a sense of humor, few will admit to not appreciating
irony. I think the most important thing I learned in that class (other than
discovering Matthew Arnold s Dover Beach, an ironic poem, I think)
was that understanding irony was no easy trick, with or without formulas.
Is it ironic that most of the time when you hear someone say, That
was so ironic, you think to yourself, No, it wasn t ? What we all need is
a book that defines once and for all what irony is and isn t. I m happy to
say there is such a book, and I m even happier to say that my former pro-
fessor didn t write it. It s a very little book called The Big Book of Irony, by
Jon Winokur (yup, that title is ironic, even if the arc of the author s life
didn t start out bad).
Winokur, who is a very witty writer, gets right to the heart of the mat-
ter, defining what irony isn t. It isn t contradiction. Irony, he tells us,
involves the incongruity between what is expected and what actually
happens; coincidence merely denotes spatial or temporal proximity. Got
it? If not, here s an example: It is ironic that Beethoven was deaf, but
merely coincidental that while two members of ZZ Top, Billy F. Gibbons
and Dusty Hill, have beards, the third member, Frank Beard, is clean
shaven.
Irony also isn t the same as hypocrisy. It isn t ironic, Winokur explains,
that William Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues, had a secret gam-
bling habit. It merely proves that Bennett is a hypocrite. Irony isn t sar-
casm, either. Irony is subtle, sarcasm blunt. Nor is irony the same thing as
cynicism ( irony discriminates; cynicism does not ). And nor is it euphe-
mism. Euphemism conceals, irony reveals, albeit by stating the oppo-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plkajaszek.htw.pl
