I wonder if Frank Sinatra would be a fan of Cake. There’s something about sad songs and waltzes and faintly glimmering radio stations that doesn’t seem to fit with renditions of crooning Christmas songs. Maybe that’s what irony is. I think that’s what it is.
I’ve been working on a handful of stories. Most have too much irony. She’s not a literary device I’m terribly fond of anymore. I think I’m worn out with her. I’ve stopped answering her texts. That’s probably a bad sign for our continued relationship. She’ll probably need to find herself soon. I hope she does.
One of the stories is a love story. It’s been working its way from some little jelly bean of thought into something much more substantial over the months. While sitting and eating soup last weekend, it occurred to me that it had lost the plot. The story I mean. Not the soup. The soup was delicious. All the same, it’s a weird thought to have over soup. Or maybe not. I seem to remember Soup putting me in a very interesting place when I was younger.
One of the serious issues with irony in stories – in life too, so basically in stories – is that it distracts from the very real problems that a character faces. Irony exists as an abstraction; it works best when pointing out the mechanical failures of… whatever. Pick your poison. Society, individual thought processes, maybe looking for love in all the wrong places, whatever.
The problem you run into when using irony as you write characters of any substantial value is that they don’t see themselves as ironic. They have no irony. Irony is a construct visited upon a character, upon a person, from the outside. Irony requires resolution of cognitive dissonance to work at its base level. Individual minds don’t have that, the cognitive dissonance I mean, though resolution is probably in as short a supply. Characters, and their minds, the minds of people, function as well-tuned, self-correcting organisms. So, naturally, any insertion of ironic witticism is usually a contrivance of the author, told through the narrator; it’s a method of disruption. It’s not what characters think. It’s what they fail to think.
What do characters think then? Well, they think stupid thoughts. Or brilliant thoughts. They have blind spots and secrets and triumphs and shames. But none of those things are ironic, not to them, not without a contrasting point of view. Those things are just life. I have a perfect example of this. A little old, but a bit of something that’ll probably never get used, get read. But it’s just too perfect an example. So here’s its chance.
“And the six months passed, a bridge back over nothing, a poor sort of portrait, gothic in direction, an invisible tableau lacking imagination because it was lacking a brain. The brain was just sitting there beside him. Staring out the rear windshield or watching simple philosophies developed in brooding buddy cop dramas. Threatening that it would tell them about real nihilism. German nihilism. The kind that brought the rockets down on the heads of thousands of orphans that had already lost more than their leaders could hope to win, spitting the word out, hope, like it was a piece of trash stranded behind a tooth, spite glaring on the backs of their tears.
“It complained of being too cold most of the time and appealed to him to turn up the thermostat. It was wearing a pair of those black-framed glasses that were all the rage amongst the kids, that young crowd of Roy Orbison fans. It kept looking thoughtfully at the implications of its looking thoughtfully. It kept saying it’s amygdalae were out to lunch and hadn’t been seen for more days than was healthy. It spoke strangely of what this implied. That was a write-up for sure, and why the hell would they let it down like that and dear God! it hoped they hadn’t been eating all that time and the Peterson project was expected by the end of the week. It said this for more days than are worth mentioning. It had no mouth. It spoke via appeals to gravitic forces that it desperately wanted to exist, to complete its house with a fourth wall. It was paranoid. It was most likely panicked. It was obviously crazy.
“Maybe they quit, he told his brain whenever he tired of listening to it or was too drunk to care. Had enough of the system. Boss was probably a jerk anyway. Incapable of understanding the value of employees with such skillsets. Maybe they just didn’t consider it an effort worth pursuit. Maybe they went to start a simpler life of gardening or pornography or something requiring maximum effort with less thought. Maybe they weren’t like almonds at all, but more the shape of sharks, thrusting forward through abysses with deeper hues in mind. They’d be mapped soon enough. The brain never replied to that, its repose sagging just a moment before it went back to contemplative windshield-staring.”
Now you see, what we have here is really just one character. We have The Brain. And one literary device. Pinky’s really just the logical avenue for expression of the irony of the narration. I like the passage, maybe just for the stream-of-consciousness imagery, but the truth of the matter is that the tone taken is one of contempt, one of disruption of passionate, albeit stupid, thought processes on the part of the brain. It’s mean.
I’m loathe to discuss too much my thoughts on Gardner’s text this week. It was largely a mechanical thing, that chapter, and something that seems better if internalized. But there is one important point he makes that is worth mentioning here – the point involving frigidity. It “occurs in fiction whenever the author reveals by some slip or self-regarding intrusion that he is less concerned about his characters than he ought to be – less concerned, that is, than any decent human being observing the situation would naturally be.” (Gardner 117) The narrator above is a dick. He is ironic, even if he’s right, because he makes the brain’s thoughts nothing more than objects for derision.
This spiel has an endgame, as my ramblings tend to, eventually. It’s a chess match, the forming of these thoughts, avenues and dead ends. Maybe more like shogi, with surprise return concepts masquerading as dragons. The love story’s already permutated. It’s something else now. It’s got some intense, uninteresting staring that I like to think still reads well. It’s got a lot of walking and some self-loathing, and a bunch of solipsistic loneliness that I would desperately like to treat with the serious warmth it deserves. It’s got shadows that might spring to life one day, if not today. And it’s probably got some irony too. I’d like to try to harness that though, make it work more toward less self-aggrandizement, more to the benefit of the very real fake brains it’s observing.
The story I’m working up for class, which I’m not going to detail right now, not this week, is one that requires a certain light touch with the irony, the goal of which is to ascribe a certain pathos to the characters. It has to be light though, or it won’t work. Because pathos isn’t something that really gels with irony. Pathos is an actual, real human emotion conjured by actual real human emotions, and derision only weakens the reader’s need to feel or the characters’ desire to be felt.