Loop-de-Loop To Write With Artful Irony

Percival Everett will show you how this literary superpower works

Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash

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Hi Everyone,

I’ve been busily preparing for my event this Wednesday in Pasadena with Percival Everett and Mas Masumoto [tickets still available HERE, if you’re in the area]. Their books have planted the seeds for half a dozen MFA Lore posts, ranging from code-switching and satire to stylistic ADHD and characterizing silence.

But as I surveyed the more than THIRTY books written by Percival Everett, including the novels James, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, and The Trees, I found myself returning over and over to a presentation one of my MFA classmates gave for his thesis lecture back at Bennington. Specifically, I kept recalling the loop-de-loop he drew on the chalkboard to diagram the mechanics of irony. At the time, I grasped what he was trying to explain in a global sense, but I never put it to the test myself with text.

Now, I saw the irony in Percival Everett’s work drawing verbal loop-de-loops on almost every page. This demanded a post.

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How does irony work?

Irony writ large is a complicated concept with many applications, but pared to the bone, it simply means that expectations produce their opposites. If you gave an ironic twist to some common adages, you’d get:

• Birds of a feather hate each other.

• Practice makes pitiful.

• Seek, and you’ll be lost.

In literature, irony serves a variety of functions.

• Dramatic irony thwarts the character’s expectations while letting the audience in on the truth. Watching Oedipus Rex, the audience knows that Oedipus killed his own father and is marrying his mother, but the irony is kept from Oedipus himself until the tragic end.

• Verbal irony is dialogue that means its opposite. “Another beautiful day in the neighborhood,” uttered in the midst of trench warfare is an example of verbal irony. “I just love your sense of style,” lobbed by an uptown girl at a panhandler, is hostile verbal irony, or sarcasm.

• Situational irony leads characters to strive in anticipation of one outcome, when fate has the opposite in store for them. Romeo and Juliet are victims of tragic situational irony. Forrest Gump’s success exemplifies fortuitous situational irony.

Mechanically, irony works like a roller-coaster carrying the reader/listener or character up a hill of anticipation but then, instead of gliding over and down the other side of the hill, the car flips and hurtles backward and upside down, in the opposite of the expected direction. This ironic loop-de-loop deposits the reader and character back at the bottom of the original hill but with a completely new and cock-eyed perception of their position in the world.

Percival Everett, hammersmith of irony

Read almost any novel by Percival Everett, and you’ll get a master class in irony. Macro and micro, irony is the turbine that generates his fiction’s absurdity, its momentum, its comedic energy and its deadly serious impact.

I’m going to take you on a close read of some passages from his novels Erasure and James to show you what I mean. In each, I’ll boldface the phrases that signal the phases of ironic looping.