The New Sarcasm

It was 1986, and I was a new teacher. My students and I had read “Hills like White Elephants.” We were in the middle of discussing it, when we came to the passage where “the man” is trying to convince “the girl” to have an abortion—though the word abortion never appears in the story. The girl says,

   ‘And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.’

   ‘I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.’

   ‘So have I,’ said the girl. ‘And afterwards they were all so happy.’

That last line may look like agreement. But it’s pretty obvious that the girl thinks otherwise.

“Hemingway’s just so sarcastic,” my students said.

I found this jarring. Sarcasm was associated, for me, with my little sister’s loud mocking voice when I would tell her something she didn’t like. 

A distinction I was taught prior to the twelfth grade had not been passed on to these kids. Something was missing.

The Old Differences

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I spoke up."This is called irony," I said.

Sarcasm, I told them, came as an emotional outburst, the child mouthing off to the adult. Sarcasm was expressed through an exaggerated voice.

In contrast, irony was emotionally restrained, civilized, an exchange between adults. To detect it, we had to understand that something other than the literal meaning was intended.

The critical term for what Hemingway was doing, I told them, was “irony.” Hemingway, the modernist, employed verbal and dramatic irony in his stories, accomplished through a normal tone of voice. The critics refer to this as a civilized reaction to the uncivilized.

“No, he’s sarcastic,” they asserted.

On one level, I got their point. Irony isn’t really well-behaved; it just looks like it is.

This isn't that big of a deal, really. The empire will not fall because of this loss of a distinction. But what bothered me was more than just my sense that something I'd grown up understanding was being lost. It was more than just a favorite restaurant closing or an old bridge being torn down. This was about culture, one small piece of it, being eroded and washed away by words used too broadly; with no distinctions, normal is bordered only by loud and soft.

End of an Era or End of an Ear?

As with the age of the big bands, modernism is past. We are living through the era of auto-tuned music. Last week, I heard an entire song in which the singer’s voice sounded like a keyboard singing. What was passed off as style, as technical expertise, was really a singer who is probably tone deaf.

Distinctions matter. We should not lose them. Irony and sarcasm are not the same. The literary school of sarcasm is found in parody. Irony may live along its borders. But it also inhabits other regions we should keep on the map.

Just as there are differences between being polite and being decent, between being unruly and merely rude, and between what is attractive and what is sexy, when we teach our children these things, we give voice to the voiceless. 

Work Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants." Men without Women. New York: Scribner's, 1927.