[To kick off the
summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and
contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations
for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]
On the artistic
and human roles and significance of irony.
As no less an
authority than Alanis
Morrissette has conclusively demonstrated, and as I’ve encountered time and
again in trying to include it in classroom conversations, irony can be very
hard to define. The line between coincidence,
contradiction, and genuine irony is at best a fuzzy one, and I won’t
pretend that I’m not likely to get it wrong myself in the course of this post. (Which
would be ironic, I think, after I opened by poking fun at Alanis—but these are
the risks we AmericanStudiers take.) But wade into the fray I must, because, as
foundational New Critic and literary scholar par excellence (and longtime professional
partner of Robert Penn Warren) Cleanth
Brooks argued in his ground-breaking essay “Irony
as a Principle of Structure” (1949), many of the great works of art are
composed and achieve their effects through ironic juxtapositions and reversals,
strikingly shifting readers’ expectations for and undestandings of seemingly
familiar images or concepts.
Two of the most
famous American poems open with precisely such ironic shifts. Emily Dickinson’s
“Because
I could not stop for death” (not the actual title, since she didn’t give
her poems titles) follows that first line with the striking “He kindly stopped
for me –,” with that “kindly” immediately offering a jarring recognition that
the poem will portray death in quite unexpected ways. T.S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land begins with an even more surprising ironic reversal: “April
is the cruelest month,” a line that, along with the extended descriptions that
follow it, turns virtually every prior poetic image of spring and flowers and
rebirth on its head. I wouldn’t put contemporary singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey on the same artistic level as
Dickinson and Eliot yet (not because songwriters can’t get there, but because
she’s far too early in her career at this juncture), but her song “Summertime Sadness”
(originally released on her 2012 debut album but best known through the popular 2013 remix by Cedric
Gervais) makes similarly interesting and evocative use of literary irony,
and provides a good case study for how such ironic images can affect audiences
in meaningful ways.
Del Rey’s song
portrays a powerful but potentially doomed summer love (the last verse, not
included in the radio version of the remix, opens, “Think I’ll miss you
forever/Like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky”), and so her speaker’s
summertime sadness could be read as a parallel to the nostalgia in Henley’s “Boys
of Summer.” But that reading would miss an important difference: Del Rey’s song
uses the present tense for every verse prior to the future tense of that last one,
and is thus set very overtly and centrally in the emotions and environment of
that idealized summertime moment (“Got my red dress on tonight [and] I’m
feeling alive”; “I feel it in the air”; “I’m feelin’ electric tonight”; and so
on). Yet despite that powerful present—or rather as a part of that present—,
her speaker still imagines the loss, feels and dwells in the summertime
sadness. And a result, Del Rey’s song and its central irony can help us
understand the way in which pleasure is always complemented by inevitable loss,
forces us to engage with the crucial fact that nostalgia for a moment in our
lives is often (if not always) produced while we’re in and enjoying that moment.
That’s a tough but important idea to consider, and one that this exemplary use
of literary irony can help us wrap our heads around.
Next
SummerStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?
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