Whistling in the dark

“Irony 101” Offers Compelling Lesson

Editor’s note: Sabrina Broselow was born in Michigan and grew up in Hickory, N.C. She was elected to ΦΒΚ at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro in1998. A doctoral candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill, she is currently conductingresearch in Stuttgart, Germany. Her dissertation, “Enlightened Gastronomy:Discourses on Meals and Mores in the Age of Goethe,” is a study of eating and drink-ing habits in the German lands from 1770 to 1830.

It is a universally acknowledged truth that graduate students are a brilliant lot. On the first day of class, a group of us had climbed four flights up to our dingy offices in the Modern Languages Building to exchange sarcastic comments and bad puns about the class on irony, which was about to begin.

As I huffed into the office, backpack dangling from one shoulder, I was asked, “Are you here for irony, Sabrina?” This query was too tempting to resist. “No, just tell me the truth for once!” I replied. A comparative literature course called “Reading Ironies” is begging for trouble from the outset.

Our professor, an aging grand dame of the academy, proved to be fragile of figure but robust of mind. On this first day of the semester, she walked slowly into the room and situated herself with dignity at the lectern. Elegantly clothed in the Queen’s blue, this wizened but bejeweled academic bent over course materials and roster sheets before calling the class to order.

Her opening lecture focused on the art of detecting irony. What clues do authors give to readers that their texts should not be taken at face value? What do context and personal prejudice have to do with discerning ironic intent? What is irony in the first place?

To open our discussion, the professor distributed a photocopied page from the “Letters to the Editor” section of The New York Times, circa June 1985, and directed our attention to a contribution entitled “Simple Tasks that Give Pleasure.”

As I skimmed my handout, the words “Saginaw, Michigan” at the bottom of the page immediately caught my attention. It just so happens that I was born in the snowy enclave of Saginaw. Naturally, I quickly checked the contributor’s name: Sally B. Carney. Sally B. Carney? “That’s my godmother!” I blurted out.

Fifteen perplexed pairs of eyes looked at me. “Your godmother?” My fellow students were astonished at such a coincidence, but our professor seemed relieved: “Well, good, you can finally help clear things up then. But don’t say anything until we’ve finished our discussion.”

Now truly amazed, I grasped our mission. Sally’s letter was a response to an article by a male contributor to the Times about the simple yet rewarding pleasure of lawn mowing. She had written to say that from her “female perspective,” she had always found great pleasure in seemingly mundane tasks:

“There have been innumerable instances in my life,” she wrote, “when a sink full of warm dishwater provided the backdrop for more profound thoughts. When a neatly folded sheet,taken down from drying in the sun, gave repose to hands fraught with worry over a sick family member. When everything in the freezer frosted over while I held the door ajar admiring the freshly made strawberry jam. I am glad to know there are men who experience similar feelings and want to write about them.”

Was Sally’s letter meant ironically?

A few chuckles from the back row broke the silence. Tentative remarks began the discussion. A jaded young woman from Romance Languages, with stringy black hair and faded jeans, got things rolling: “She couldn’t possibly mean this seriously. I mean, unless she’s June Cleaver or something.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” came a non-committal riposte from the back of the room.

“No, but listen,” an outspoken blonde in the front row said adamantly. “It’s the last line that really puts it over the top. The freezer frosting over? Who wants that? It’s obviously an overt clue to her sarcasm.” Various nods of agreement supported this logic before an earnest young man from Germanic Languages piped up. Maybe the irony of Sally’s letter lay discreetly in the word “simple.” “Making jam,” he theorized, “isn’t simple at all!” Heads were really nodding now.

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never made jam.” It was the student with stringy black hair again. Then an advanced student decided to flaunt his learning by drawing on context. “Saginaw,Michigan, in the ’80s? Anyone subscribing to the Times would have to be more sophisticated than the letter lets on,” he reasoned. “Obviously, she didn’t mean for us to read it straight.” “What do you have against Saginaw, Michigan?” I couldn’t help myself. Our professor intervened with an interpretation of her own. When she had stumbled upon this letter some 15 years ago, she told us, she had been at the zenith of her academic endeavors. As a rigorously educated Radcliffe graduate resolutely married to her career, she had found it inconceivable that any woman could have written such unabashedly domestic sentiments—and have meant them. “But,”she conceded, “I am beginning to think today that I possibly misread that letter because of my own youthful prejudices.

”Finally I was able to contribute to the discussion. “So, Sabrina,” she asked me, “what can you tell us? Did Sally B. Carney mean what she wrote, or is this letter an ironic commentary on the mundane lives of middle-class women?”

As any good literary critic knows, the question of authorial intent is always a murky one. Aware of the quagmire I was entering, I cast my eyes down to my desk before answering: “Well, I haven’t seen Sally since I was three years old and my family moved from Michigan to North Carolina. But I can tell you that for Christmas this year, she sent me a hand-sewn apron.”

Needless to say, my godmother Sally did indeed write “Simple Tasks that Give Pleasure” in all domestic sincerity. And this ironic episode on the first day of class has since become a critical moment in my own literary training.

Who could soon forget, after all, the spectacle of disciplined academics fervently drawing on a host of semi-marketable hermeneutic skills and dutifully legitimating their claims by the text—only to come to such a gross misreading?

And what does such a misreading say about the legitimacy of our enterprise in the first place? Is literary criticism per se always jeopardized by the prejudices of its practitioners? And if so, should we, as wardens of fictional truth, be seriously concerned? Isn’t that irony, after all?

As one of the most duplicitous and devious of literary devices, irony in its myriad forms serves as a crucial reminder that even the most scintillating wits of the academy should always be wary of taking themselves—or their endeavors—too seriously.

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