Enjoying the view from Limbo
Joseph Conrad said that “women, children, and revolutionaries hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all actions.” To challenge Conrad’s broad judgment of women and children (“Wasn’t the juvenile Jane Austen a most clever ironist?”) is perhaps to prove his point: One mark of a “true believer” is his inability to take a joke...
Irony is overplayed and lost when its implicit sense comes too far forward and reveals itself as the foreground meaning, hence obliterating the critical distance the ironist requires in order to achieve his defining purposes. For the defining purposes of irony, pursued to varying degrees of emphasis by all ironists, are humor and philosophy–neither humor nor philosophy pursued independently of the other, but the...
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