The Keenest of Lessons

Just imagine for a moment that you are teaching a class. One of the topics that you have discussed with the students in the class is irony. You’ve done plenty of reading about irony and thinking about irony; you think you understand it well enough to explain the basics to some people who know little or nothing about it. So, you indicate that irony is the gap between apparent meaning and real meaning.

You explain to them that irony takes various forms, but that this is the idea of irony itself: when a remark that seems like a compliment is intended to be an insult, e.g. “Great lecture, nerd boy!” which is really intended to be a scathing indictment of a mediocre lecture, as opposed to praise for a great one. Verbal irony, or sarcasm, on display.

This can also manifest itself as dramatic irony, when what seems to be the case to the character in the fictional world isn’t really the case, and the reader of the play on the page, or the witness to the play on the stage or the screen, knows what’s really the case. Sophocles was a real master in this domain. Poor, complex Oedipus.

Or situational irony, when the apparent meaning of the situation is not what it appears to be. A student who never studies, for example. Someone who appears to be what they are not in reality in a given situation or circumstance.

Or cosmic irony, when the whole order of things is not what it seemed to be, as when a devout believer perishes and finds themselves, as a disembodied spirit, in the hell of a different faith tradition altogether, etc.

So, suppose you are teaching this class one day, and you say, sarcastically: ‘There’s a bunch of secondary literature on the course page, but you shouldn’t read any of that, should you?” And some of the students who hear this take it literally. They infer that they shouldn’t read articles that you took the time and trouble to upload for their use. They miss the verbal irony, the sarcasm, entirely. And they tell their friends who never come to class that they shouldn’t touch that material either. They also say you must be crazy or stupid, if you put the material up on the course page, and then told them not to read it. They have a good laugh at your expense.

When this happens, do you laugh at the situational irony? Or do you weep at the smug, stupid hubris of people who should know better, but do not? Or do you realize, to your sighing chagrin, that if you tempt and cajole the spirit of irony, it will have fun at your expense?

This experience might reveal the melancholy meaning of these words, which appear in a bitter work of academic satire by J.M. Coetzee, suitably entitled Disgrace: “He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn, learn nothing.”