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.

Writing the Way Commander Data Speaks and Other Remedies

Last month, I wrote in my blog "The Blame Game" that I would be giving a presentation for my colleagues at APU on writing as a college-worthy study across various disciplines.

I can say confidently that we had an intelligent discussion. We mostly agreed on three big ideas. First, writing is a process. Second, learning to write well takes concentrated study and practice. And third, this study and practice can happen in various courses across the college curriculum.

The Players of the Doubting Game

As expected, there were a few hold-outs, a few doubters who believe that using contractions, for example, is evidence that their students do not write well generally, and the remedy is to focus on “the rules.”

In certain disciplines, contractions like “aren’t” and “they’re” are not considered professional. Apparently, in those fields, evidence of objectivity is found in writing the way Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation speaks. (I never heard him use a contraction even once, though I’m sure someone somewhere could prove me wrong on this.)

The remedy for this, as I suggested, is not to teach rules but to introduce students to discipline-specific guidelines. I do this with my course. I include a style sheet spelling out what isn’t acceptable in my own field of Composition. 

I should add a side note here about the rule on contractions: The truth is that in certain genres of writing in English, contractions are acceptable. So is the use of the first person pronoun “I.” This is all evidence that we are not talking about a rule, but something else, something perhaps like courtesy or knowing what is appropriate given circumstances that change.

The person who voiced this concern was predictably not convinced. I think the person asserted it this way: Students really need to learn the rules.

None of the evidence I used could change the minds of the people thinking like this.

Writing as Believing Game

When we watched the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation, I remember that my children were all drawn to Commander Data. He, and not Wesley Crusher, the one child on the show, was their point of identification. They loved Data. My daughters called him “Macaroni Man.”

I think they identified with him because he struggled to understand the adults around him, and he never got the “feel” for it. He could sound official, and he was a useful and even beloved member of the crew. But he couldn’t tell jokes. I suppose he is a poster child for learning by following the rules: acceptable but stiff and lacking in content or lyricism.

My kids--human, of course--in their play and rehearsing and thinking have learned the lessons that Data proved incapable of. They learned not through rules only, but through play.

The parallel, I hope, is clear. Writing is a form of human communication. We learn to communicate not only through rules, but through a great deal of trial and error. Play is a part of that. Process is also. Having models of good writing for a particular discipline really helps, and this can lead to productive parody, which is more play.

Finally, as I have found to be true of most people, when we are working through this process, if we are given a bit of encouragement, the human part of us kicks in and we get more involved in what we are trying to do. We can then be in a position to make new connections we hadn’t seen before.

I would value hearing your concerns and objections. Dialogue on this issue can only be helpful.