The Politics of Irony in American Modernism

Matthew Stratton

• Publisher: American Literatures Initiative
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823255467
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Shortlisted for the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Book PrizeThis book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw "irony" emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, Stratton shows how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing.It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis. This book, by contrast, is the first to derive definitions of "irony" inductively, showing how writers employed it as a keyword both before and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. It focuses on writers who not only composed ironic texts but talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, and many others.

1 / The Eye in Irony: New York, Nietzsche, and the 1910s

You will find irony treated angrily, as though it were an acid or a poison, where men love ease. And you will find it merely ignored when men have wholly lost the sense of justice.

—Hilaire Belloc, 1910

Amor fati is the core of my nature. This, however, does not alter the fact that I love irony, and even world-historical irony.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888¹

Paul Fussell has claimed that there “seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”² In specifically literary terms, Fussell’s influential assertion is agreeably consonant with the emergence of the New Criticism, high modernism, and canonical postmodernism, all of which are thought to be distinguished by the salient employment of different ironies. “Irony” simultaneously describes a form of consciousness, a rhetorical trope, a mode of aesthetic representation, a characteristic of historical events, and a disposition toward various modes of signification; if these are all imagined to emerge from the wholesale failure to flout laws of unintended consequences, then perhaps the notorious “rise” of irony really can be traced to the trenches of the Somme, whence it virally spread throughout the brains and books of the Anglophone world. What to make, however, of those years before “everything” putatively shattered into fragmented, disillusioned chaos; between the hopeful turn of the old century and the recognition that events in the new century might be more horrifying than any prediction? Was that period dominated by a single form of premodern, mid-modern, low-modern, mini-modern, or quasi-modern understanding? Are we to imagine that those years of apprehending, remembering, and representing the world were notably devoid of irony, either by definition or in comparison with prior and subsequent epochs?

There are obviously as many answers to that question as there are definitions of irony, and it’s certainly easy enough to adduce all sorts of “modern” irony before 1914. Even in the moment, “irony” was used to describe the effects of the war, such as political theorist Harold Stearns’s question in 1919: “when we look back now to the days before the war, did not the graceful sensuous satire, the slightly tired irony . . . seem best to typify the sophisticated anti-intellectualism of that era[?]”³ In trying to assess just how irony “came to be what it is,” the real question raised here is not whether irony was invigorated or exhausted by the war; rather, what was the cultural logic whereby such observations and propositions are coherent in the first place?

To approach the question of how we arrived at particular visions of irony in general, I want to suggest that the cultural deployment of “irony” as a term is best understood as a rhetorical staging area for the relationships between aesthetic and political problems. I’ll do so by considering the work of two American theorists of irony in the context of irony’s purported enemy: political praxis. In the space of a few years, and within a few miles of one another, American writers Randolph Bourne and Benjamin De Casseres used the word “irony” to describe multiple and competing intersections between aesthetics and politics. Bourne’s concept of irony has been scrutinized and anthologized, explicitly championed or implicitly attacked, however, while the exclusion—not to say repression—of the equally prolific, more forthrightly individualist and avant-garde De Casseres reveals some of the aesthetic and political assumptions that structure both literary history and a particular political imaginary. Placing the two writers in dialogue with one another through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, who influenced them in profound and different ways, suggests a more agonistic, pointedly conflict-oriented mode of discourse than the “Beloved Community” promoted by the Young Intellectuals of Greenwich Village and not coincidentally helps delineate the limits of how “irony” is frequently deployed in our own literary and political discourse.

Bourne himself advised that “Words are not invariable symbols for invariable things, but clues to meanings,” and my concern is not to enumerate the multiple meanings of “irony” as classical trope, narrative mode, or dramatic recognition but to show how irony served as a central term for representing aesthetic-political action through intersecting contemporary discourses about photography, visuality, politics, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as it circulated in the early twentieth-century United States.⁴ This nexus of discourses does more than merely destabilize the conventional opposition between modernist and postmodernist ironies, and more than merely argue in favor of “irony” as a political disposition against its implied opposites of “sincerity” or “earnestness” or “commitment.” In the New York Nietzscheans of the 1910s, I find in irony not just a term to describe particular aesthetic practices within particular democracies but a model for imagining and reimagining democracy itself. Bourne and De Casseres both figure irony through the language of aesthetics but in almost violently different ways: by restoring this conversation about irony to an actual dialectic, I propose we read irony as a figure for reconceiving democratic action quite differently from the legacy of “liberal democratic irony” of critics in the wake of Richard Rorty and Hayden White, who value private irony but banish public irony and demand solidarity with liberal institutions at the expense of agonistic, publicly ironic individuals.

Randolph Bourne is still fairly familiar to scholars of American literature and culture, and his paean to pluralism, “Trans-National America,” can fairly be called part of an ever-expanding canon.⁵ After achieving renown for his essays in publications as different as the decidedly bourgeois Atlantic, the markedly liberal New Republic, and the frequently radical Seven Arts, Bourne was famous by 1913 and dead by 1918, an underemployed victim of censorship and influenza, fired from The Dial by his erstwhile mentor John Dewey, blacklisted and harassed by FBI agents for loudly opposing American entry into World War I. A central figure in the prewar “Lyrical Left,” by 1930 his fame had dwindled to the point where Lewis Mumford could plausibly claim that there “are many ways of establishing how old a person is, and one of them is to mention the name of Randolph Bourne.”⁶ This remained periodically true after John Dos Passos memorialized him in U.S.A. as the “tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak . . . crying out in a shrill soundless giggle: War is the health of the state,” but Bourne’s figure has been resurrected repeatedly: when the League of American Writers gave Theodore Dreiser the 1941 Randolph Bourne Memorial Award in recognition of Dreiser’s stance against American entry into World War II; during the early days of the Cold War, when anarchist-libertarian-socialist Dwight Macdonald invoked Bourne’s image in his journal politics; when Noam Chomsky quoted extensively from Bourne’s essay “Twilight of Idols” at the height of the movement against the war in Vietnam, finding in Bourne’s essays “no program for action, but an injunction to seek such a program and create for ourselves, for others, the understanding that can give it life”; and more recently by opponents of the American invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bourne’s work (and beatification as a minor, secular saint of anti-imperialism) resurfaces both because he “rejected colonialism, bastard Anglo-Saxondom, and the cheap melting-pot American in favour of a transnational America,” as his friend Paul Rosenfeld wrote in 1923, and because his opponents “concentrated the whole of this powerful little man in a single resistant ironic point.”⁷

Drawing parallels between the pre–World War I “Lyrical Left” and the 1960s New Left, Daniel Aaron remarked that “much of Bourne’s philosophy of life is contained in ‘The Life of Irony,’” and much of that philosophy emphasized how new forms of politics would aestheticize being and behavior, partially by cultivating a discursive politics of friendship.⁸ “Good talk” among a community of like-minded friends, Casey Nelson Blake writes, “was the perfect example of Bourne’s conception of irony, making intellectual exchange personal and yet objective, just as friendship itself united individuals in an emotional bond that still preserved their integrity as separate persons.”⁹ Most seem to agree that “Bourne’s central argument in the essay was that irony was best understood not as a trope but as a lived experience that comes in accepting contradiction”; as Ross Posnock shows in drawing parallels between Bourne’s work and that of Theodor Adorno, “Pivotal to Bourne’s revisionary practice is irony, which he employs less as an aesthetic term than as descriptive of a quality of action that avoids crystallization by dissolving conventional oppositions, like passive/active.”¹⁰

By displacing aesthetics in favor of personality and conversation, and by demarcating social performance, friendship, and embodied experience from aesthetics, the critical consensus on Bourne’s irony isn’t so much unjustified as it is symptomatically incomplete.¹¹ In his 1913 essay titled “The Life of Irony,” Bourne does indeed figure irony as a modus vivendi that is partially distinct from aesthetic representation, and right away asserts that “we should speak not of the Socratic method but of the Socratic life. Irony is a life rather than a method.”¹² With much more on his mind than a screed against Socratic rationalism, Bourne then expands his definition of irony to subsume an essentially discursive practice among acquaintances and friends, conducted with the express aim of expanding sociality, gaining new viewpoints on the world and formulating new approaches to the truth, and trusting that the moral category of the “good” will emerge from such interactive inquiry. Drawing on the figure of Socrates, Bourne describes irony as a

pleasant challenging of the world . . . insistent judging of experience . . . sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities, of comic juxtapositions, of flaring brilliancies, and no less heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s world being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only by being translated into and defined in each others’ terms. (102)

The idea that irony can “translate” one set of terms into another in order to arrive at a functional definition of justice, for example, is familiar to readers of Platonic dialogues. Yet for Bourne, irony is neither simply a rhetorical strategy to reveal an interlocutor’s poor reasoning nor “a pose or amusement” (103) but is simultaneously “a life of beauty” (102) and “a critical attitude towards life” (103). The life distinguished by dissenting irony rather than agreeably complacent faith, Bourne writes, is a mode of conducting serious business without grave earnestness and as such provides a welcome “rival of the religious life,” for “the life of irony has the virtue of the religious life without its defects. It expresses the aggressive virtues without the quiescence of resignation” (105). The ironist may be “at one with the religious man in that he hates apathy and stagnation, for they mean death,” but “he is superior in that he attacks apathy of intellect and personality as well as apathy of emotion” (105).

Visions of Values, Envisioning Democracy

The significance of Bourne’s pragmatism, his catholic openness to a shifting world of social relations, his prescient theorizations of ethnicity and gender as central loci for important political contests, and his legendary status as an opponent of bellicose American imperialism have been well established. The full significance of his irony, however, quite literally remains to be seen. In a passage that lies at the heart of the essay, Bourne presents his concept of irony in pointedly aesthetic terms:

The ironical method might be compared to the acid that develops a photographic plate. It does not distort the image, but merely brings clearly to the light all that was implicit in the plate before. And if it brings the picture to the light with values reversed, so does irony revel in a paradox, which is simply a photographic negative of the truth, truth with the values reversed. But turn the negative ever so slightly so that the light falls upon it, and the perfect picture appears in all its true values and beauty. Irony, we may say then, is the photography of the soul. The picture goes through certain changes in the hands of the ironist, but without these changes the truth would be simply a blank, unmeaning surface. (110)

The initial comparison of irony to “the acid that develops a photographic plate” is both innovative and venerable: despite the relative novelty of photographic technology, the idea of irony as “corrosive” has a long tradition that includes the salt with which Horace and Ben Jonson rubbed the cheeks of their audiences, the acid invoked in 1910 by Hilaire Belloc, Benjamin De Casseres’s 1922 “Irony is an acid pity,” and Northrop Frye’s “irony is . . . an acid that will corrode healthy as well as decayed tissues.”¹³ Bourne’s photographic metaphor of irony, however, develops into a full-fledged consideration of visual representation, visual apprehension, relationships among varying accounts of truth and realism, and an explicitly Nietzschean “transvaluation of values.”¹⁴

In the 1910s, photography held forth the promise of accurately representing facts, and Bourne’s conceit simultaneously emphasizes photographic images themselves, the means by which those images are composed, and the effect of those images on the aesthetic dispositions of percipients. Thus the ironist’s life includes the literal, sympathetic translation of intersubjective points of view with the goal of winnowing out weak ideas, for “if an idea is hollow, it will show itself cowering against the intellectual background of the ironist like the puny, shivering thing it is. If a point of view cannot bear being adopted by another person, if it is not hardy enough to be transplanted, it has little right to exist at all.”¹⁵ Furthering this analogy between photographic and ironic processes, he acknowledges that meaning is produced through a complex interplay of subjective positions and aesthetic objects embedded in a social context and that there might be profound social implications if “perspectives” were exposed to the light of irony rather than the Enlightenment of reason: “Too many outworn ideas are skulking in dark retreats, sequestered from the light; every man has great sunless stretches in his soul where base prejudices lurk and flourish. On these the white light of irony is needed to play” (109). Thus the paradoxical result of expanding and multiplying perspectives on the world might actually be an aggregate reduction in total points of view; just as photography renders the multiplicity of vision into a few focused images, irony presents multiple views while framing a response to those views based on a system of values. After all, Bourne writes, the “dictum that ‘the only requisites for success are honesty and merit,’ which we applaud so frantically from the lips of the successful, becomes a ghastly irony in the mouth of an unemployed workingman. There would be a frightful mortality of points of view could we have a perfectly free exchange such as this” (109).

Bourne’s reference to visual media pointedly invokes the Aristotelian metaphysical tradition that imagines vision as a privileged means of acquiring knowledge, which Claire Colebrook describes as “a desire to see or wonder of seeing [that...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Irony and How It Got That Way: An Introduction
• 1. The Eye in Irony: New York, Nietzsche, and the 1910s
• 2. Gendering Irony and Its History: Ellen Glasgow and the Lost 1920s
• 3. The Focus of Satire: Public Opinions of Propaganda in the U.S.A. of John Dos Passos
• 4. Visible Decisions: Irony, Law, and the Political Constitution of Ralph Ellison
• Beyond Hope and Memory: A Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography