Red Whine to White Wine

I am certain that there are many ways to tell a story, but I have been thinking specifically about two of them: one that is told with complaint and one with irony. The former rails against the world and cries, “Why me?” while the latter shrugs their shoulder and says, “Well, what did I expect?” The former bemoans and the latter laughs. The complainer howls with rage and the ironist narrates with wonder. In the former there is an urgent request, sometimes even a demand, for sympathy and the story contains righteous anger; but in the ironist’s narrative there is embedded an invitation to mirth. Paper, short for Newspaper, from the counter at which she holds regular court, tells the news to the townsfolk of Pottstown in James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. “Rolling out rumors and news chatter was her gospel song, always melodious and joyful.” One of her listeners calls out to her, “C’mon Paper, story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop, y’know.” Paper’s stories are longed-for and colorful even if the story she narrates is doleful. What the ironic tale lacks is bitterness, but the complaint story, lacking irony, offers an environment that is dirge-like and burdensome. The complaint story invents a vengeful world and the ironic story offers an untidy one. 
            We all want to be understood, but the complaint story is not told necessarily for understanding. The complainer simply wants to be recognized as a beleaguered party and defined in the role of an oppressed victim. The ironist accepts to a substantial degree their complicity in events in which they realize themselves and attributes the happenstances in some part to their own eccentric stable of hobby-horses. In the complainer’s story the teller is a victim but, in the ironist, they are an unintentional (but not innocent!) co-conspirator in the situation. A story about a schlemiel—a complainer—depicts the ill-fortune of a victim, but the tale of a schlimazel—the ironist—describes the experience of a simply luckless individual in the wrong place at the right time. In the story replete with irony there is humor—I think of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, Alvy Singer, or Dr. David Huxley, in Bringing Up Baby: there is humor. But in the complaint story there sits pain and misery. The latter might be John Dowell (the narrator of The Good Soldier) or any number of memoirists writing about their troubled lives. Seinfeld’s George Costanza or Shakespeare’s Richard II are story tellers of complaint. The ironist can find humor in the complaint to which the complainer is oblivious. I think that the comedians I enjoy most are ironists who narrate with affection the exigencies in which they find themselves in a world of turbulence and chaos; the complaint comedians dislike the world that oppresses them and would be rid of it. The complainer demands acceptance, but the ironist invites to hearers an almost absurd sense of involvement and resulting joyfulness.
            I grow weary of the complainer because their stories turn me into a sounding board and from whom only a sympathetic response is required, even sometimes demanded. Oh, I listen, but I become resentful, for there is only a specific place assigned to me in the complaint story. The ironist welcomes their listeners to join in the experience and they express amazement and joy in the world. In the television now streaming series Northern Exposure, Dr. Joel Fleishman in Cicely, Alaska, goes from complaint to irony and in the process learns to share in community and its sense of wonder. In that experience he becomes a better person and maybe a better doctor.
            I would be an ironist . . . and, as one, I recognize that implicit in this post is complaint!