Iannis Goerlandt in his essay “Put the Book Down and Slowly
Walk Away: Irony and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” says, “Wallace is constantly concerned with irony”
and goes on to say that irony is “a major theme of [Wallace’s] essays and
interviews” (309). This is
undoubtedly true. Wallace uses the word “irony” over fifty times throughout “E
Unibus Pluram”. This is important
in that Wallace associates irony with postmodernism, and we can see this in the
“E Unibus Pluram” as well, he uses the term “postmodern” over fifty times and
often in conjunction with the word “irony”[1].
For Wallace, these two concepts are inextricably
intertwined. He puts forth as the “thesis” for “E Unibus Pluram” that: “irony,
poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of
contemporary U.S. culture” and that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and
effective, and that at the same time they are agents of great despair and
stasis” (49). He does say that
what he is most concerned with is what he calls a “subgenre” (50) of
postmodernism, which he intimates is called a number of things from
“post-postmodernism” to “Hyperrealism” to “Image-Fiction”, the latter being the
term he seems most comfortable with, or at least settles on. At any rate, these “sub-genres” are all
informed by postmodernism. He then
goes on to talk about “irony’s aura” (54). It can’t be said for sure whether or not Wallace is directly
referencing Walter Benjamin’s idea of “aura” from “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, but it is highly likely. Benjamin describes “aura” as being a
work’s “uniqueness” (1056), and that this uniqueness is innate. Wallace’s position on postmodern
irony’s aura is that it “has always set the nobility of individualism against
the warmth of communal being” (54).
That is to say that most people want to be individuals while at the same
time wanting desperately to feel as if they belong. He uses television advertising as an example of this.
As a for instance (not from Wallace): Cee Lo Green singing
for a 7-Up commercial, “Be free and express yourself, do what comes naturally”,
followed by the catch phrase, “Be yourself, be refreshing”. Irony’s aura at work here being that
7-Up is suggesting that the lone viewer of the commercial can express
individuality by purchasing its product while simultaneously it is marketing
directly to the masses. This
becomes problematic in that most contemporary art production, from literature
to television, adopts the same sort of postmodern irony.
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