Isn’t It Ironic?
Americans and Irony
Americans have long been fascinated with the oddness of the British, but the English, says Terry Eagleton, find their transatlantic neighbors just as strange. In his new book, Across the Pond, Eagleton dissects the manners and mores of Americans from the other side of the Atlantic. What follows is an excerpt from the book, in stores now.
I once wrote a piece for the New York Times that included a few mild touches of irony, only to be informed by a startled journalist on the paper that irony was unacceptable in its columns. One should be as wary of writing for a journal which bans irony as one should for one which seeks to ban immigrants. There are English journals, by contrast, in which the use of irony is almost as compulsory as the use of commas. Pieces can be sent back for being insufficiently insincere.
It is a mistake to think that Americans do not understand irony. Yet though they may respond to it, they rarely initiate it. They also occasionally blunt its edge by too blatantly sarcastic a tone. For a puritan civilisation, irony is too close to lying for comfort. A renowned American philosopher once told me of a discomforting time he had spent at an Oxford High Table. Throughout the entire evening, he had no idea whether a single word that was said to him was meant to be serious or not. “Dammit!” he exploded to me, “I’m an American!” And this was a philosopher for whom irony was a precious moral posture, though he did not seem to appreciate the irony.
Even with compulsory daily readings of Oscar Wilde, however, it is hard to rid Americans of the prejudice that there is something admirable about what you see being what you get.
One of the gravest moral defects of Americans is that they tend to be straight, honest and plain-speaking. There have been various attempts to cure them of these vices, including the establishment of clinics where they can receive intensive therapy for their distressing tendency to mean what they say. Even with compulsory daily readings of Oscar Wilde, however, it is hard to rid them of the prejudice that there is something admirable about what you see being what you get. (“I live in constant fear of not being misunderstood,” Wilde once remarked, a statement it is hard to imagine on the lips of Pat Robertson.) For puritan types, appearances must correspond with realities, the outer present a faithful portrait of the inner, whereas irony involves a skewing of the two. To the puritan mind, appearances are acceptable only if they convey a substantial inner truth. Otherwise they are to be mistrusted as specious and superficial. Hence the familiar American insistence that what matters about a person is what is inside them. It is a claim that sits oddly with a society obsessed with self-presentation. There is no room here for what Lenin called the reality of appearances, no appreciation of just how profound surfaces can be, no rejoicing in forms, masks and signifiers for their own sake. Henry James writes in The American Scene of the country’s disastrous disregard for appearances. For the Calvinist, a delight in anything for its own sake is sinful. Pleasure must be instrumental to some more worthy goal such as procreation, rather as play on children’s TV in the States must be tied to some grimly didactic purpose. It can rarely be an end in itself. The fact that there is no social reality without its admixture of artifice, that truth works in terms of masks and conventions, is fatally overlooked.
The philosopher Wittgenstein once remarked that “A dog cannot lie, but neither can he be sincere,” meaning among other things that sincerity is as much something you acquire socially as a large bank balance or a reputation for reclusiveness. Jane Austen knew well enough that to be natural, rather like being ironic, is a form of social behaviour one has to learn. For her, observing the social conventions was a question of respect and consideration for others. No ceremony could be less empty. Nothing is more artificial than a cult of shambling spontaneity. People who are self-consciously blunt, plain and forthright are in the grip of an image of themselves quite as much as people who think they are Elvis Presley or Mother Teresa.
Language for the puritan is at its finest when it clings to the unvarnished facts. This prejudice has given rise in the States to a thousand creative writing classes in which sentences like “And then we rolled into town still hauling the dead mule and Davy said how about some fried eggs and he was still kind of sniggering at the thought of Charlie hollering at that goddam prairie dog and we landed up at Joey’s place with the sun still warm on our backs and the coffee was good and strong” are judged superior to anything that overhyped Stratford hack ever managed to pull off. The United States is one of the few places in which stylelessness has become a style, cultivated with all the passion and precision of a Woolf or a Joyce. It is against this current that the likes of Bellow, Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich are forced to swim.
“And then we rolled into town still hauling the dead mule and Davy said how about some fried eggs and he was still kind of sniggering at the thought of Charlie hollering at that goddam prairie dog and we landed up at Joey’s place with the sun still warm on our backs and the coffee was good and strong.”
It was not always thus. Jeffersonian Virginia was renowned for its oratory and rhetoric. The genteel class of New England were praised for what one observer called their “intellectual vigour, exalted morals, classical erudition, and refined taste.” Elegance was in high regard. A fluency of speech and manner was thought by some Americans of the period to provide a bulwark against the dangers of demagoguery. There were those, to be sure, who regarded rhetoric as suspect. It was a form of manipulative speech typical of the ruling powers of the Old World, and thus out of place in a genuine democracy. Even so, a nineteenth—century American writer praised “the chaste and classical beauty” of the nation’s finest legal scholarship. The lawyer, wrote another commentator of the time, will exhibit “that combination of intellectual power, brilliant but chaste images, pure language, calm self-possession, graceful and modest bearing, indicative of a spirit chastened, enriched, and adorned” by a study of classical civilisation. It is a far cry from Judge Judy.
Henry James thought that America lacked mystery and secrecy, that its landscapes were all foreground, but found just such an air of enigma in Europe. This was not, he considered, by any means wholly to its credit. Civilisations which prize the mannered, devious, playful and oblique generally have aristocratic roots, since it is hard to be mannered, devious and playful while you are drilling a coal seam or dry-cleaning a jacket. And aristocratic social orders, as James was to discover, can be full of suavely concealed brutality. A dash of American directness would do them no harm at all. A culture of irony requires a certain degree of leisure. You need to be privileged enough not to have any pressing need for the plain truth. Facts can be left to factory owners.
Even so, there are times when irony is the only weapon one has at hand. Take, for example, those freakish right-wing Christians in the States who brandish banners reading “God Hates Fags” and gather to rejoice at the funerals of servicemen and women killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such people relish nothing more than for some passing liberal to engage them in indignant debate, denouncing their bigotry and homophobia. To do so is surely a grave mistake. Instead, one should ask them why they are such a bunch of liberal wimps. Why are they waving their banners when they could be acting as the Lord’s avenging arm by wiping his enemies from the face of the earth? Why don’t they actually do something for a change, have the courage of their convictions, rather than standing spinelessly around? Why are they such a gutless bunch of whingers?
One of the classic forms of American humour is the gag, which marks its distance from the seriousness of everyday life rather as wearing a baseball cap marks the fact that the American male is on vacation. Wearing a baseball cap signals “I Am Enjoying Myself” even when you are not, rather as a bishop’s mitre signals “I Am Holy” even when he is indulging in indecent fantasies beneath it. Humour in this view represents a holiday from reality, rather than a consistent stance towards it. Nobody is likely to mistake it for the real world. Most gags do not force you to reassess your relationship to reality.
For a certain kind of English patrician, by contrast, irony is less a figure of speech than a way of life. As a highly Europeanised American observes in Henry James’s The Europeans, “I don’t think it’s what one does or doesn’t do that promotes enjoyment. . . . It is the general way of looking at life.” The gentleman’s amused, ironic outlook on human existence is a way of engaging with the world while also keeping it languidly at arm’s length. It suggests an awareness of different possibilities, one beyond the reach of those who must immerse themselves in the actual in order to survive. The aristocrat can savour a variety of viewpoints because none of them is likely to undermine his own. This is because he has no viewpoint of his own. Opinions are for the plebs. It is not done to be passionate about things. To have a point of view is to be as uncouth and one-sided as a militant trade unionist. It would be a threat to one’s sang froid, and thus to one’s sovereignty. To find the cosmos mildly entertaining has always been a sign of power in Britain. It is the political reality behind Oxford and Cambridge wit. Seriousness is for scientists and shopkeepers.
One of the finest exponents of the English language in the United States today has been the art critic T. J. Clark. Another was the late Christopher Hitchens. Both of them came to the country from England. It can be claimed that to write as well as this, with such tonal subtlety, verbal self-assurance and exquisite play of light and shade, you need a well-established cultural tradition in your bones. In England, that culture has often enough been snobbish, malevolent, and supercilious. The novelist Evelyn Waugh had all of these vices to excess, yet they are also related in complex ways to the splendour of his style.
That permanent house guest of England, Henry James, pressed the nuance and ambiguity of English writing to the point where his prose threatened to disappear up its own intricacies. Among other things, it was a way of putting some daylight between himself and his plain-speaking native land, as was his habit of sucking up to a set of boneheaded English aristocrats. Nothing, not even Communism, could be more anti-American than James’s mannered, fastidious, overbred later style, horrified as it would be at the very idea of telling it like it is. Like James, the English upper classes value a certain verbal obliquity. This is because to talk confessionally is considered unsophisticated, and people of this rank would rather be thought wicked than naive. In this, they are at one with the natives of Paris. You would not ask someone like this on first meeting how many children he had, not because it is impertinent but because it is hard for him to return a stylish reply.
The style, they say, is the man. A friend of mine in New York once gave a copy of my Literary Theory: An Introduction to a friend of hers, an American woman who belonged to that wretched minority of creatures on the planet who have never heard of me. On handing the book back to my friend, the woman inquired “Is he gay?” No, said my friend. The woman pondered for a moment. “Is he English?” she asked.
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Terry Eagleton was born in Manchester, England. The author of more than forty books, including the seminal Literary Theory: An Introduction, he has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Manchester. He resides in Dublin.
