LUDIC LOG

The problem with irony isn't that it's dead. (I admit that I have mentioned in this space before that irony is dead, but in fact, I was being ironic.) The problem with irony isn't that it has suffered unduly since the Bad Thing happened. (Far from it; more than a few ironists were in the game before the towers even fell, the bastards.) The problem with irony is that it doesn't know when to quit.

Or perhaps this too is confining the Irony Problem to a frame too small for the canvas. A wise friend of mine recently said, in reference to irony's philosophical nephew post-modernism, that the thing about it is that it's not something you can stop doing. Once you've accepted that particular world-view, it's pretty much permanently in the "on" position, and you can't turn it off (at least as long as you're the same person; but who is?), no matter how convenient it would be to do so. The same might well be said about our humble servant irony: no matter how delicate a position you happen to find yourself in, if you've gotten used to palling around with the Big I, he's likely to barge in no matter how much you'd like him to go away. People can get sick or die; crazy men can fly planes into buildings; sincere young gentlemen of inestimable talent can talk passionately about world affairs and subjects quite close to their wide and brimming hearts, and still that annoying little imp perches on your shoulder and whispers in your ear that something is not quite what it seems.

Irony is not a welcome guest at such moments. When dedicated, and unquestionably forthright, religious lunatics are said to be plotting our collective demise, no one wants to hear a wry comment about how the government is busy taking away all the enjoyment in our life in aid of preserving our lives. When a public figure said to be universally beloved dies, deploying litotes and other fancy-pants rhetorical flourishes to imply that maybe she wasn't as terrific as everyone thought is the sort of behavior that gets you a good talking to. The very word "irony" comes from a root meaning "liar", and liars are noted not as good citizens or good company but as shameful, dissembling creeps who are ever trying to pull a fast one on someone. What kind of a person habitually says the opposite of what they mean? What kind of person claims that good things are bad, and vice versa? What kind of a person stands there and tells you one thing, when in fact they are building a wall inside themselves that consists of entirely another?

Apparently not the kind of person we want writing books anymore, if the success of the "New Sincerity" is any indication. Spearheaded by Dave Eggers, Neal Pollack, Lydia Davis and a handful of others and typefied by the online and print magazine McSweeney's, the "New Sincerity" stands for...well, it's hard to say exactly what it stands for, but as with many reactive artistic movements, it's easy to say what it stands against: irony. Proud standard-bearers of this curious mini-revolution are quite explicit in their distaste for dramatic irony, post-modern affect, unreliable authorship, narrative distance, and emotional or textual incongruity. They describe irony as played out, passe, the weapon of choice for cowards and the emotionally immature. Wearing their hearts far past their sleeves, dripping and beating warm in their hands, they embrace with a disturbing frankness their every emotion and passing fancy, elevating their work (which is almost universally autobiographical and diaristic) to an autojournalistic level of self-absorbtion: each recalled passion, each banal moment, each pop-cultural frippery assumes a gargantuan importance lest it be tainted with an emotion-killing layover of irony.

But it's not so easy. The excesses that distance, perspective and subjectivism wrought are not dispelled with a warm smile and a charming line. The problem with irony may be that it never knows when to stop, but the problem with sincerity is that it never even gets started. As has been pointed out innumerable times, "sincere" doesn't preclude "stupid"; and as every good showman knows, the audience only indulges camp when it thinks you know better. Andy Kaufman was an evil genius: he would crush a crowd in his hands and watch their dying writhe as he sang schmaltzy pop songs, or paraded out his relatives to do Catskills schtick, or read entire chapters of novels. Why was it great when he made people squirm like this? Because he knew better. Because he didn't really like "Come Fly with Me". Because he knew it was torture watching his uncle do a soft-shoe. He never let go of the joke; in fact, he was the greatest performer ever in terms of keeping the pretense in an unbreakable stranglehold. But he still knew better. On the other hand, when David Shields talks about his crippling acne, or when Dave Eggers tells witless stories about watching Battlestar Galactica with his little brother, they're, well, they're just going on and on, and the only reason that we're supposed to pay attention is because they really, really mean it. Sorry: it doesn't work that way. Telling a stupid story because you know it's stupid and you're artificially enhancing its stupidity has a knife-blade sharpness when it's done well; but telling a stupid story and thinking it's not stupid is just telling a stupid story, no matter how much you care about what happens in the story.

None of this is to say that sincerity is worthless; it's not. Before irony was allowed to get its foot in the door of our collective aesthetic, almost everything was sincere, and plenty of it was brilliant. Nor is it to say that there's no case to be made against the prepoderance of cheap, facile irony currently gunking up the culture. Nor yet again is it to say that some of the "New Sincerity" crowd isn't worth reading; Eggers and Pollack both have real talent when they allow themselves to step out from under the shadow of their personalities, Shields is often brilliant when he's not writing exclusively about himself, and one of the very first essays that called for a new sincerity was by David Foster Wallace, himself a quondam ironist and one of the best young novelists in America. It's just that the ironic outlook is universal -- one can use dramatic irony and ironic expression to contain any number of artistic expressions and circumstances -- while sincerity is, by its very nature, absolutely personal, specific and individual. And since great literature must aspire to a universal resonance, sincerity can only take you so far. That's why these talented writers have little choice, so long as they remain bound to a creed of sincerity and false rectitude, to remain glorified diarists; and that's why their work will not be remembered kindly.