The kinds of verbal irony in evidence throughout this novel—Brett and Bill are the most obvious examples, but minor characters like Harvey Stone (“like a cat”) also fit the bill—is a quintessentially modern mode. It can be seen as a reaction against the kind of seriousness that led to the First World War, a flaunting of one’s apparent lack of vulnerability, gullibility, or credulity. It goes hand in hand with the nonstop drinking throughout the novel—both serve as a form of emotional deflection. If nothing is worth taking seriously, why not flaunt the fact by being drunk at all hours, talking constantly in a way that is amusing, creative, often hilarious, but never, ever straightforward or serious. Part of everyone’s extreme dislike of Cohn stems from his lack of irony—everything’s so serious with him (as Brett says, later, “I hate his damned suffering” [186]). Irony means never having to admit you care, or that you can be hurt.
Back to Burguete: Bill is still in bed, and Jake is trying to get him moving, to get to the river for some fishing. Bill wants to talk, and talk means ironic verbal play, and he wants Jake to participate:
“Come on,” I said. “Get up.”
“What? Get up? I never get up.”
He climbed into bed and pulled the sheet up to his chin.
“Try and argue me into getting up.” (118)
Of course, Bill doesn’t actually want Jake to engage in a rhetorical argument in favor of Bill getting out of bed; he wants Jake to play along. Jake is having none of it: “I’m going down to eat.” There’s fishing to do. But Bill won’t let up:
“Aren’t you going to show a little irony and pity?”
I thumbed my nose.
“That’s not irony.” (118)
He then sings an ironic riff on a popular song, with lyrics celebrating “Irony and Pity.” Jake asks him, “What’s all this irony and pity?” (119). Bill explains that it’s the new thing—“They’re mad about it in New York”—and then he tries to teach Jake how to play the game. He’s not a quick learner.
“Ask her if she’s got any jam. . . . Be ironical with her.”
“Have you got any jam?”
“That’s not ironical. I wish I could talk Spanish.” (119)
Bill then proceeds to essentially give Jake lessons in irony, but he still isn’t getting it. His next attempt is a lame pun on “jam” (“I could ask her what kind of a jam they think they’ve gotten into in the Riff”), and Bill despairs, “You can’t do it. . . . You don’t understand irony.” Jake protests that it’s “too early in the morning,” but Bill is right—with all the characters speaking ironically throughout this novel, Jake never takes part (maybe introducing Georgette as his fiancée, but that’s as close as he comes). In an effort to illustrate further how irony works, Bill offers some more object lessons, going off about coffee (“Coffee is good for you. It’s the caffeine in it”) and humorously disparaging Jake as an “expatriate. One of the worst type” (120). He really gets going (“You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. . . . You hang around cafés”), and Jake is still the “straight man,” but he maybe starts to seem like he’s picking up on the mode: “It sounds like a swell life. . . . When do I work?” Bill doesn’t miss a beat: “You don’t work. One group claims women support you. Another group claims you’re impotent.”
“No,” Jake replies. “I just had an accident.”
Ouch. Irony hits too close to home; the verbal play bumps up against painful reality. The joke goes too far. “Never mention that,” Bill says, and he loses some steam. “He had been going splendidly, but he stopped,” Jake narrates. “I was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about being impotent” (120). Jake enjoys Bill’s riffing, and he implicitly claims not to have been “hurt.” He knows Bill doesn’t mean it. Bill doesn’t ever mean anything. They try to get it going again, but Bill has lost his enthusiasm. “Let’s lay off that,” he says (121), and then he starts getting all serious and emotional about what a “hell of a good guy” Jake is, and how he’s “fonder of [him] than anybody on earth.” He tries to “save” this surprising turn with some more irony (“I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about,” and so on), but the mood has been killed. He finally stops, refuses to give Jake “some more,” and promises to try again “at lunch.”
So, as with his earlier risqué efforts at ironically deploying racist epithets or making jokes to priests about joining the Klan, Bill’s relentless pursuit of ironic humor ends up touching a nerve—he feels bad, even if Jake claims not to mind. But at lunch, after a good morning of fishing, he’s at it again—and this time, Jake seems better equipped to play along. Bill begins parodically eulogizing the recently deceased William Jennings Bryan (whose death—on July 26, 1925—is reported in the paper, which helps us date the setting of the novel), chicken drumstick in hand, and Jake picks up on his riffing on the word “utilize” (“Here . . . utilize a little of this” [127]). He asks Bill, “Didn’t you like Bryan?” and Bill is off again, but this time, look at how Jake keeps up:
“I loved Bryan,” said Bill. “We were like brothers.”
“Where did you know him?”
“He and Mencken and I all went to Holy Cross together.”
“And Frankie Fritsch.”
“It’s a lie. Frankie Fritsch went to Fordham.”
“Well,” I said, “I went to Loyola with Bishop Manning.”
“It’s a lie,” Bill said. “I went to Loyola with Bishop Manning myself.” (127)
After Jake admits to “only” bringing two bottles of wine for their late-morning excursion, Bill accuses him of being “in the pay of the Anti-Saloon League” (i.e. a Prohibitionist). Jake resumes the earlier thread: “I went to Notre Dame with Wayne B. Wheeler.” “It’s a lie,” Bill replies. “I went to Austin Business College with Wayne B. Wheeler. He was class president.” “Well,” Jake says, “the saloon must go” (127-28). These American alcoholics in Spain, drinking two bottles of wine with lunch and joking about Prohibition back home, while parodying a beloved American orator of the previous generation and the whole Ivy League networking obsession (I went to ____ with ____)—Jake seems to have “learned” how to do irony. Bill’s lessons are sticking.
So would a little “irony and pity” be a good thing for Jake? Is Bill getting at something serious here? The ironic mode treats everything—racism, elitism, Prohibition, even Jake’s injury—as a joke, and this might be a way for Jake “not to think about it,” which he finds so hard to do, in large part because his injury makes him feel like the butt of a cosmic joke, a victim of irony. The mood is pretty light when, again surprising us, Bill gets serious: “What about this Brett business?” (128). Jake admits to having been in love with her “on and off for a hell of a long time,” but then he says, “It’s all right. . . . I don’t give a damn any more.” Now, we strongly suspect that this isn’t exactly true—and he will indeed seem to “give a damn” in subsequent chapters—but the immediate effect here suggests that Bill’s irony has served as a diversion, a way to exercise Jake’s mind in less serious or consequential areas.
But how long can irony’s deflection hold out? We ask this question of Brett, who seems to be avoiding reality in a range of ways throughout this novel. Irony may be the modernist response to the horrors of war, Hemingway seems to suggest, but the ugly reality persists. Jake will continue to be wounded, his life altered irreparably (his “generation lost”), and he will continue to think about it.
To paraphrase Jake, it may be awfully easy to be ironic in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
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