TRANSCRIPT

Transcript: 5.01 Irony and Ducking Accountability

31 Jan 2025

Original Episode

Not My Text!  Irony and Ducking Accountability

Transcript

Transcript: 5.01 Irony and Ducking Accountability

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Key Terms:

  • Dramatic Irony
  • Accountability
  • Narrative Distance

 

My cheek still stings a bit from the memory and the definition: “Irony is a mode of perception in which at least two views of the same thing exist; one limited, the other(s) less limited.”  “Irony is a mode of perception in which at least two views of the same thing exist; one limited, the other(s) less limited.”  “Irony is a mode of–”

And for those of you just joining us here, check out the dirty details in the last 12 minutes of our last episode, when I recount a professor who slapped me in 1984.

Oh, now, I can hear (and have heard from) a few: We signed up for an exploration of literature and you drop this assault story on us. First, are you okay? Second, where is the guilty old professor now? And are you making light of assault victims?  Phew!

First, I am fine. I was fine then (just surprised), and I’m fine now. (But I guess I am still thinking about it, so . . . ) Second, the professor has since passed on, but in between his retirement and passing and that early class session, an interesting (and not at all masochistic, really) relationship developed which I will undoubtedly talk about at later and more relevant times. And finally–and most importantly–of course not. Assault alone is a serious enough topic that it warrants hours-days-months-years of examination for our social readjustment to new ideas of the nature of trauma, social spaces, and justice. But if you feel that my experience undermined the topic, I apologize, and I will endeavor to give warning in advance when I approach topics like this again. 

As I said, however, I was unprepared for the attack and the lesson both, and I felt they were connected, that I was a limited perceiver, and that I did not wish to be. Was I responsible for it? Probably not. But was I now accountable for it? I absolutely was. And am. 

And what the heck am I talking about now? I’m accountable for when I am attacked, for when I learn something? Like Oedipus, I had to decide for myself if my life would be tragic?  Well, —–[music] absolutely.

[[THEME MUSIC]]

A Little Oedipus: Responsible or Accountable?

So I want to explain myself. And I will. But let’s make sure we’re standing on solid earth before we move forward, okay? I said last week that:

  • Irony is one of the most important elements of all literature. Without defending that overmuch even yet, I’ll stand by it. 
  • I said that we’ll be talking about a challenging writer to begin our journey, Andrew Marvell. His poem “To His Coy Mistress” has some issues, and they aren’t simple. 

Let’s hang on to these trail signs as I now try to explain why I’m accountable like a little Oedipus. 

I’m told that in debate class it’s important first to define our terms. Heck, I taught that in debate class, so who am I kidding? I told myself, thus making it true. And right now I’ve got two: responsibility and accountability.

Now I could take you around a dozen or more websites and sources which attempt to describe the difference between these two words, and no four would agree precisely. Dictionaries often define them in a loop: to be responsible is to be accountable; to be accountable is to be responsible. (Sidebar: did you ever notice that the word “encyclopedia” taken etymologically literally means “to walk in circles”? So reference books are hardly a help.) In the fields of business today these terms are used often, but often with one slopping over into the other.

For an opening gambit, then, let’s try it this way, at least for this next twenty minutes or so: Responsibility is an internal claim on our actions: we own them, the choices we make and what happens afterwards. If we are responsible, we accept that what we do is “on us.” It’s internal.  Accountability is also a claim on our actions, but it is external. That is, after the decision there are consequences, and we must answer for them. We steal cookies and our mothers hold us accountable; we feed the dog two pints of warm Budweiser to see what happens and the dog holds us accountable for his subsequent vomiting (an example that has no personal experience attached to it at all at all); and we write a poem that is offensive to an entire religion or culture, and the critics have something serious to say to us. This is not to say that all accountability acts are ones of justice; after all, the dog could have deposited the experiment on Frank’s shoes, but no. . . ).

More seriously, we might look at the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Think what you wish of his writing or of the content of Satanic Verses. As a responsible writer, he understood what choices he made as he composed his work, and while he did not anticipate quite the global and polarizing responses he received, he worked through what that accountability would look like: years of a changed name, 24/7 protections, and, more recently, the loss of an eye and nearly his life. Few of us might argue that this was just, but it’s not my point–our attacker, too, is held accountable for the attack. Rushdie accepts responsibility for lowering his own safety precautions, and in his biography of the event, Knife, works his way back to a level of accountability for what he does about it now. 

Ah, and that’s important. The consequences are consequences, and we may not always be in control of them, only what happens afterwards, what we decide to do or not do afterwards. How we answer for the words we speak or write, how we answer to the words of others, what we do from consequence or fail to.

Poor Oedipus. He was told plainly his fate on several occasions (You shall kill your father and marry your mother). In the drama, this is set, outside of his control. But his situation is not tragic because the gods decided to slap him around any more than someone like Job might be. But now that he has been told, now that the play has been set into motion, what does he do? Deny. Refuse. Run from his adoptive parents. Marry an older queen. Deny the prophet Tiresias and others in his own investigation. None of that was ordained by the gods; that’s on him. He is accountable for his foolishness and stubbornness and even belligerence which motivates him to kill the king. Tragedy isn’t about bad things happening; it’s in how we hold ourselves accountable or fail to. Job, too, suffered, until he learned, accepted. 

I may not be responsible for the slap that I experienced, I may not have fully understood the definition of irony beyond a glib ability to recite it from memory for the professor. But I sure as hell am accountable for what I do next. Whether I press charges or fail to, whether I drop the class or stay, whether I play pariah or stoic in the next class, and whether I–in the end–decide whether whatever is being offered is worth learning in these unstable conditions.

I stayed. I accepted responsibility for staying, and I was now accountable for that choice, too.

Accountability, for writers and for readers, is a truism. We may not all feel responsible for what we do, but we cannot in public space (or even to ourselves) escape accountability for choices. 

Okay, Definitions down. Check.

Along the way we learned that fate and religion and politics and curmudgeonly professors and writing are all dangerous business.  It’s no wonder that so many writers have attempted to dodge accountability, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself again–I’ll talk about their efforts in a minute.

Barbeques and Reader Accountability

What about readers?

Are we accountable for what we read? The answer has to be “yes,” right?  And not even a simple yes, at that.

Suppose we’re the curators at a museum and have to consider whether to include works of the well-known artists Andres Serrano and Mapplethorpe. Not sure who they are? Well, I’d tell you why I chose them but that might well offend, so I will say to go ahead and DuckDuckGo them, but make sure you have your parental filters on when you do. Ah, those kinds of artists. Okay. Well, as curators of our museum we have some hard decisions ahead, and also have to check for our “Gallery Rated R” signs. Because, of course, we are accountable to our visitors. And if we decide not to include them in the museum, then we are accountable for our public stance on “controversial” art. You know the museum that has the least hassles about controversy? The one that displays nothing at all.

You see where I’m going, I bet.  Books in classrooms is an easy parallel. Teachers who choose to include a text OR even those who choose not to discern between texts taught simply because it’s been a tradition to offer them. (Shakespeare is violent and lewd!) On the other hand, teachers who choose not to include that text or who resist traditional offerings must ready themselves to be held accountable. (What, no Shakespeare?)

Responsible teachers should always be ready to be held accountable, regardless of who wants to try to do it. No given text is pre-approved “okay” just because no one challenges it.

Let’s now add to our definition of accountability. Accountability, at its best, is a calling for inquiry into the health of the discursive spaces we inhabit. In other words, let’s ask questions about the kind of language spaces we want, and note that writers shape those spaces. 

So let’s for a moment consider writers in our personal and public spaces. What do we do with a text like Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” and I’ll preface this with a popular accusation that Marvell and his little grotesque of a poem are misogynistic. Uht ohh.

The good news is that Andrew Marvell is dead, oh, for about 350 years so there is precious little chance he’ll come knocking on my bedroom or classroom door except in the lowest rated episode of Tales From the Crypt ever. And too few people have even read him these days to likely grab pitchforks in his defense. No, I suspect we’re safe from scandal by setting him quietly aside. 

Now, to be sure, this isn’t book banning, is it? We’re just making choices about what to include and what not to, and misogyny is–despite bro sub-culture catcalling–not a virtue. It sounds like we shouldn’t teach him, maybe we shouldn’t even read him. Yup. Sounds like. Sexual innuendo bad!  And if I find a collection of his works . . . 

As readers (and maybe teachers), though, my recommendation is that we first understand exactly what that text is up to before we willy-nilly run off burning poems and books. 

So it’s not my interest or intent to argue book banning, at least today. I’m far more interested in these preliminary steps. In other words, I don’t want to hear anyone banning, burning, or barbecuing my woman-hating author until I am certain what all this woman-hating is about.

On what basis do we make the decision to dis-include a text from our lives? What consequences are we accountable to in making those choices?

Many debates about inclusion or removal focus on the author’s guilt or responsibility for the words written.  They turn into debates that revolve around presentism, that the values of the time or region were simply different from today, and we do the author an injustice by demanding–usually-a-he–meet the changing values of the present day. Therefore, he is excused. Or the debate may touch upon extenuating circumstances or trauma the author has experienced: Well, this author grew up in the antebellum American South, so education and language were colloquial, abrasive, raw, and honest. The voice is authentic.  We may even claim that the author could not have known about the offensive nature because of these limiting circumstances. Rudyard Kipling did journalism in India, but his colonial circles of acquaintances may never have shown him the horrors he writes so ignorantly about. 

To my mind, asking about the author’s responsibility is the wrong question, the wrong direction. What we better ask: are we ready to hold ourselves accountable for whatever installation we choose? Are we inquiring into the health of the communities we inhabit? Again, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Rudyard Kipling, and Andrew Marvell are all dead: they don’t care what you decide now and they’re not presently feeling very responsible, anyway.

The decision for accountability is with readers. We decide what to do with literature now:

  • That may be a school classroom or library or public performance
  • That may be my full-price purchase of the book through a massive online store where corporations profit
  • That may be tonight’s storytime with my five-year-old (um, if I had one)

And the removal or absence of the text does not make us less responsible or accountable for that absence. The overlooking, rejecting, or omission is as much a personal and political decision as inclusion.

For instance, is H. P. Lovecraft racist? Sure. But, let’s think less about whether or not Lovecraft’s racist ideology personally disqualifies him from the culture. And instead, we might ask whether or not we should read him ourselves, and whether or not we should spend our time creating multiple documentaries of his life and celebrating his horror in classic editions. What does such an installation of Lovecraft’s biography do to our acceptance of that racism? (And later we’ll need to talk about responses to these very issues, such as Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country or Percival Everett’s book James which brilliantly responds to our culture’s installation of Twain’s Huck Finn.)

Look: Irony is a mode of perception in which at least two views of the same thing exist, one limited, the other(s) less limited. 

What can you and I as readers do to be the least limited of perceivers here? To know as much as we can about what writers do?  A short answer: We can read a text critically before we slap a “banned book” stamp on it, quietly slide it off of the choices for this semester’s curriculum, or avoid the “dusty old poetry” section of the public library, or declare a fatwa against it. Reading critically is the responsible thing to do. We can’t hold ourselves easily accountable–that is, we cannot easily answer for a decision that we ourselves did not fully understand.

And there’s good news ahead. I might have said earlier that writers themselves, wary of the dangerous politics and all around them, have ways, techniques, for evading responsibility.  Let’s talk a little about what some of these might be, and that should set us up for our “real talk” about Marvell’s poem, okay?

Ducking Responsibility

Historically, the idea of author meant someone with authority, someone who was able to demonstrate that authority by building upon history, upon past traditions and writers, about then answering for those writers and surpassing them. More than an “original writer,” then, the author claimed tradition, scholarship, and grew it. Don’t tell me that Virgil stole the Aeneid adventure plot from Homer. And don’t try to accuse our man the Bard Will Shakespeare of stealing the legend of Hamlet or a dozen others of his plays. This was not theft; it was demonstrating authority. Originality in writing as a virtue comes later in our writing history (and so does copyright law).

And this is one method an author uses to try and off-load personal responsibility for what gets written: someone else already did it. This leaning on authors of the past was and is quite common. Dante writes the Divine Comedy partly to compose epic poetry for his reputation, but he clearly chooses the history and religion and authors of Italy for an epic spiritual mash-up. 

But Dante also uses our second technique, a calling upon the Muses or gods to tell the story, to allow the poet to be a “vessel” for the truth. The responsibility for the work, then, falls upon them. Homer, too, says: “Tell me, muse, of the man of many ways who was driven far journeys after he had sacked Troy sacred citadel.” Homer is clearly no longer in charge of the story, per se. A little rhetorically slick, a bit unconvincing, but also these are writers traditionally setting ego aside to create their epic verse.

Such humility! This, too, is a technique and tradition for these early writers. Begging for forgiveness in advance of audience response. Shakespeare, in one of many examples, has Prospero of The Tempest say, “but release from my bands with the help of your good hands, gentle breath of yours / My sails must fill, or else my project fails, / Which was to please.” In other words, we’re sorry. We just wanted to please you and make you happy on this humble stage.. We didn’t mean to, you know, offend you if it happened. But, you know, we appreciate some applause If you thought we did OK. Just please don’t hold me too too much responsible by running me out of town, or even throwing tomatoes.

Writers, too, might make persona of themselves, public images, to serve as effigies for responsibility, to become targets for the tomatoes. Wasn’t it Rush Limbaugh who claimed in court that he never said anything offensive but that his character did?  Public image is a powerful vehicle. Dante used it, but so did John Milton of Paradise Lost fame. Milton, by the way, was a friend of Andrew Marvell’s, and we’ll see if that means anything later.  No, the public image or public idea of a writer often overshadows the reality, thus almost completely disguising the actual writer’s responsibility: JD Salinger, Lewis Carroll, etc. I hear philosopher and writer Ayn Rand was a real fan of the 1970s series Charlies Angels. 

But if writers can make characters of themselves, certainly one of the easiest ways to escape responsibility for challenging ideas is to place them in the mouths of fictional characters in our stories. Dante the Pilgrim who wanders through the Inferno is specifically different from Dante the Author. And the meme “Thanos was right” is still fairly popular, even though he advocated the extermination of 1/2 of all sentient creatures in the Marvel Universe. Or the misanthropic alienation of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye: the antihero of that story becomes a kind of emblem for younger readers of the time, resistant to the mindless routines of culture. Villains Ozymandias in Watchmen and Magneto in X-Men both warn us. Killmonger is Black Panther and Roy in Blade Runner were hateful, but they spoke of oppression in compelling ways. In each case, we don’t completely reject the ideas, do we? We consider them, and the author handily, is not responsible for advocating for the ideas of his fictional characters. 

And another technique to mention. If the writer can create a fictional character, let’s also consider the creation of another character too often overlooked: the narrator or speaker of the work.  

Irony in Narrative Distance

The author is not the narrator of a novel, nor the speaker of a poem. Let’s start with that position as the default. We may find a few cases where this is almost true, that they are the same, but I want us as readers to work from the other direction, so we don’t get lazy and assume it.  We’re going to call this technique, Narrative Distance, where the author distances herself a bit from the speaker or narrator.

The poet who falls asleep and dreams of Xanadu is not Coleridge, even though the editorial footnotes often say so. He’s a creation of Coleridge.  Langston Hughes writes the poem “Cross” about a speaker who is of mixed race; Hughes was not. Emily Dickinson writes as a male in her poem, “There’s Been a Death in the Opposite House.” In Sylvia Plath’s ”Mirror,” the speaker is an object, the mirror. In “Bull Song” by Margaret Atwood, the speaker is, um, a bull.

When I was interviewed for my poetry book Unwoven, I was asked by two of the three interviewers about my separation from my speakers, that it was surprising that I created persona, speakers with circumstances different from my own. My only thought was, of course. Why limit myself to writing only directly from my own experiences? This is always easier for us to see in novels and short stories than it is in poetry, where so much verse is written in first person that we presume that the speaker and the author are the same. 

Now, if you are a writer of poetry, by the way, ask yourself how conscious you are of this persona you consciously or unconsciously create when you begin the poem. Is the speaker of the poem always you, exactly? Which version of you? Which aspect of you? at what age? In what mood? You see what I mean by a mismatch between the total author and the speaker created? 

What our author is up to is the creation of a character–narrator or speaker, fiction or poetry–that is in some ways more limited in their understanding of the situation. The author/ity knows all of it, but the speaker does not. The speaker of the poem in such a situation is an ironic speaker. Remember irony is about perception. Limited perception. How one character or another sees or understands less than others or less than the author or less than we as readers. This ironic perceiver is ignorant to something, biased in something, flawed in some way, in need of growth. And this ignorance is crafted into that speaker character by the writer. If we miss this idea, think now about the idea of responsibility and accountability. If we misread the poem or story and believe that the flawed character is actually speaking the exact same feelings as the writer, ohh, that’s our bad. As a reading community. And teachers in that community, not as an author. We might make consequential choices about a text without fully understanding it.

Do we understand something that the speaker of a poem does not? Why is that limitation of the speaker significant to the theme of the work? When William Blake writes his poem “The Tyger,” what do we know of that speaker who asks, “Tiger, Tiger burning bright / in the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / could frame thy fearful symmetry?” It’s fairly easy for us to see, even in the first stanza, that Blake is asking how a God could create an evil and scary thing like a tiger. It’s a fairly old philosophical question. How can a God who’s supposed to be all good allow evil to exist in the world? Most readers of the poem stop with this idea, they say, “That’s a good question. What is this all about?” And then they maybe walk away from the poem with this, you know, pretty often spoken deep thought, and move on to a few hours playing Fortnight.

Consider now, though, what we may know of the speaker who is not Blake. Let’s challenge that speaker for a minute. Are they missing something in the argument? Is there a logic or issue they do not see? What does the speaker likely feel as a result of this question, and is that feeling justified? Is there some place less conflicted that they need to reach, to grow to? Why would Blake have a character who is in this way conflicted? It’s possible that Blake was concerned about this question, too, yes, but I want to suggest that this lazy reader assumption, one that I held for many years, is a weakness in our reading. 

Who is this speaker who, like Job and even Oedipus before him, challenges God? Is that what’s going on here? Or is he honestly expecting an answer? What happens if he gets one? 

In his “Auguries of Innocence,” Blake writes, “This questioner, who sits so Sly, / shall never know how to reply. / He who replies to words of doubt, / doth put the light of knowledge out.”  Knowledge for Blake, the ultimate of which is Imagination, is dulled by pessimistic questions, simple and direct answers. We must not be too quick with either, though the speaker of this short poem “The Tiger” offers us just this: Short question. One example that demands an account for all of creation. One does not question God quite so smugly.  The question of how to account for evil as posed here is not Blake’s question. If anything, Blake understands the failure of the question, and if we were to look at this at greater length, Blake understands the much larger question implicit in that failing. But notice here that from this perspective, the speaker as ironic perceiver and not author, the meaning of the poem is nearly reversed. This is the power of irony, and we will never underestimate it in reading. 

 Let’s hang on to this idea as we consider how we hold writers and their words accountable. How we look at some apparent misogyny in Marvell. And let’s consider our own accountability in doing so. If we misread a work, who is responsible, accountable for that misreading? 

Now go read something.

 

Show Notes Links:

Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress 

 

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