The Irony Monster: First and Last Deity

The Irony Monster is the deity of the future perfect: it determines what it all will have meant. It is a logic rather than an agent, but it creates an agency effect as powerful as any of the old gods. In fact, as randomicity with a purpose, it is the most fearsome of the cosmic forces. Its victims are legion, many of them famous: Herodotus’ Croesus, Sophocles’ Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Kleist’s Penthesilea, the Republican Party in 2016. Like the god of the Old Testament, it is all powerful, it is capricious, it has a distinct cruel streak, and we must submit to it because we have no choice. Unlike that other god, it is not loving, rarely merciful (though frequently entertaining), and it has dictated no sacred text, though much of the world’s finest stories pay homage to it. It has no temples, but we sacrifice to it every day.

The Irony Monster’s central task, function, joy, and nourishment is the punishment of certainty, bad faith, and self-aggrandizement. Like a curse without a curser, it is at work when the things we do to avert suffering make us suffer all the more, when the things we do to fulfill our desires ensure our frustration and failure the more surely. Nietzsche, while he didn’t know the Irony Monster’s name, was one of the first modern philosophers who appreciated the grisly entertainment it provides and who understood its ancient, close association to the divine realm. Of humans, he wrote in the Genealogy of Morals:

Let us add immediately that the fact of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, produced something so new, deep, unheard-of, enigmatic, contradictory and full of futurity that the aspect of earth changed in its essence. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to do justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not in sight—a spectacle too wondrous, too paradoxical to take place on some ridiculous planet, senselessly unobserved.¹

Nietzsche’s humans are ironically constituted, but only a divine audience could fully appreciate their efforts to extricate themselves from the ensuing predicaments. The irony monster is always at work, but in order for its outline to appear, the story of its interventions must not only be told or performed but told and performed in the right way. In this, it resembles the uncanny, of which Freud says: “a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life,” but “there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.”²

If the Irony Monster was honored in Ancient Greece more than anywhere, Attic Tragedy in particular was as close to being the Irony Monster’s church as any institution has ever been. Nietzsche speaks of the “genuinely hellenic joy”³ an Athenian audience would have experienced while watching Oedipus convict himself of patricide (with incest thrown in as a bonus irony, as it were). In Greek myth, as well, the Irony Monster has always sat amongst the Greek gods, meting out the punishment that enhances narrative pleasure: to Tantalus, Sisyphus, Cassandra, and so many others, all stuck in ironic loops of misery. For the proper contrast, think of the equally inventive and equally gruesome but entirely unironic punishments of German fairy tales which give satisfaction of a very different, less cerebral sort.

In response, though, Athens also produced one of the Irony Monster’s most talented challengers, the anti-tragedian Socrates whose life’s work can be understood as the sustained attempt to tame irony, to make it no longer monstrous, to subdue it, to make it curl up at your feet. Did he win the fight? Perhaps on points, because a cup of hemlock is a rather petulant move, whereas drinking it when you don’t have to is a classy one. Or perhaps, the cup of hemlock was the Irony Monster’s ultimate tribute to one of its most honored foes—to let you die on...