Irony

There is a sentence in Nadine Gordimer’s novel Burger’s Daughter about which in these times I have been thinking. Rosa Burger is Burger’s daughter. Her parents had been political activists in South Africa during the apartheid regime. Her mother has spent time in prison for her political activities and has died an early death from a debilitating disease; Rosa’s father, a medical doctor, had been sentenced to life imprisonment for what the regime terms political sedition. He dies in prison from illness. The politically committed life of her home is the only life Rosa has ever known and she has grown up with an identity that has been formed by the political commitments of her parents, by the consciousness that has developed in her home out of an awareness of the obligation of social responsibility, and commitment to others, and whose life remained (and was built) always on the awarness that others suffered. Rosa must learn to have an “I” because her entire identity was formed by her parent’s politically committed life. She has been Burger’s daughter and not Rosa.
     Rosa works for a time for an investment adviser. Barry Eckhard, her boss, lunches out with his clients. To the clients she is often introduced with some flair as Lionel Burger’s daughter. Then this sentence appears: “Sometimes she was invited along with them to expensive restaurants where their simple lunches of grilled kingklip were proof that they were not vulgar tycoons.” And I read that sentence as filled with irony. These clients are indeed, I assume, meant for the reader (in this case, by me) to be, in fact, vulgar tycoons. But I wonder how it is I come to that conclusion. How do I identify this sentence as intentionally ironic, as bursting with other senses of possibility.
     Irony can be defined as an awareness that the meaning of the words reaches beyond their surface. I assign to the words meaning opposite to their conventional sense: these clients are vulgar tycoons despite the sense in the sentence that though they seem aware that this luncheon might make them appear as privileged, spoiled rich people, their intention by ordering kingklip (which I assume to be a rather pedestrian and inexpensive menu choice) intends to identify them as common folk, (at least as common white folk in a legally segregated society might appear). I believe that those words couldn’t mean what they on the surface seem to say.
     I must know the literal meaning of the words, “vulgar tycoons” and the wish of these clients not to appear as such. But I recognize, I believe, that the words mean other than their familiar sense. I know that the opposite, or rather, just more, is intended. These men might, indeed, believe that their menu selection defines them as just plain folk, but there is for me an opening to other meaning.               Rosa Burger has lived in a politically radical and committed household informed by Marxist and other liberation teachings; her mother and father have been persecuted for their activity to bring civil, human rights to the oppressed disenfranchised Black populace; Rosa’s entire sense of self has been defined by a commitment to that struggle for equality. But the activity of the men with whom she lunches depends to a great extent on the maintenance of the status quo that subjugates the Black population and on whose labor these men receive huge (and unearned) profits. Everything about their position is in opposition to the committed life that Rosa Burger has lived. I understand, I think, something about Rosa Burger, and that this knowledge informs me that those men with whom she lunches represent everything against which her parents fought and in that struggle even gave up their lives. I think. These clients are not not vulgar tycoons though it is possible that they are not aware of that possibility. But I recognize that these clients are to themselves not vulgar tycoons but that they are that and more. My capacity for irony offers me this perspective.
     I bring to the reading and particularly to that sentence an awareness of the historical struggle to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and because I understand the interest of Barry Eckhard’s business and of the interest of he and his clients to maintain the social strata that ensures their continued power and wealth, I can appreciate the emptying of literal meaning from the words and the loading into that now-available space of other meanings. The irony in this particular sentence also derives from some awareness that I possess of the nature of Rosa’s character, and the forces the novel narrates that have shaped her. And the irony with which I read and must now continue to read derives from my awareness of the context out of which this sentence arises, and arises as well out of my own (sometimes guilty) ire at the privileged position of that of the clients and the oppression upon which their privilege is based. I suffer from my own sense of white privilege. I understand the irony in this sentence as a capacity to recognize the personal and the communal contexts in which that sentence rests and from which its meaning may swell and make new meanings available.
     Donald Trump does not recognize individual or communal others: he can neither understand nor generate irony. As far as he is concerned there exists only the surface of meaning of his words because there can be no meaning beyond what he means. There is no subjectivity other than his own, and no community in which he is not the defining and definitive center. His world is a severely circumscribed one and consists of nothing but himself and the world as he defines it from his subjectivity. Irony offers the infinity of meaning and subjectivity: we are always in process and never only what we are. But Trump is condemned by his paranoid narcissism to the constraints of the literal and to a very shallow, severely limited and limiting possibility of meaning. In these very complex times Trump’s incapacity for irony is dangerous and for the rest of us replete with irony.