The highest of the forms of sincerity, irony, is still practiced, but is not as sighted as before those who would not have to have a problem in capturing it. Perhaps there is a direct relationship between that progressive misunderstanding of ironic language and the increase in constant misunderstandings in our world.
With so much misunderstanding to the agenda, one recalls the times in which we were known that, among the types of irony that covered literary fiction, was the verbal. Remember: the character said something that meant the opposite, and said it to emphasize, or create something that, by the way, we are scarce lately: humor.
Irony, humor. All brotherhood if there are no leaks in it. When they occur and people do not share the same humor, it is as if there is a habit that one of them threw a ball to another, and it was established that this other had to catch and return it, and that some of those people, instead of returning it, placed it in their pocket.
In the last century, before the Internet, Vladimir Nabokov was a pioneer in warning that in order to answer certain questions from his interviewers there should be a typographic sign that refer, for example, to a smile, to a kind of concave sign, to the rounded pumps round up that at that same time we would like to draw as an answer to the odious question that they had just done. He warned when asked “where you place between the writers (living) and those of the immediate past.”
Go now! In response to such a loading question about living and dead, Nabokov sensed that he lacked one of those typographic signs that today on the Internet indicates if you have to laugh, cry, express a gesture of doubt and emit a dizzy facial message halfway between ambiguity and the directly ironic. For something it will be that this sign has not invented it, perhaps someone has had the detail of not wanting to add more misunderstandings that end up complicating our world even more.
Let’s go down to ground, let’s descend where they are leaving irony, once a great conquest of intelligence. Let us descend to a simple scene, with the simple Pope Francis of the protagonist, we descend to better understand the tragedy of the loss of our verbal irony, a setback linked to a certain reverse of humor in the literature. Let’s descend to let the very agile and undoubtedly ironic response – in Borges – that the Argentine Pope who approached him to tell him: “Holy Father, I am a seminarian of Valladolid.”
“What am I blame?” The Pope replied with a laugh.
And everyone laughed. As before, when the ironies were captured. But it is surprising that in the websitewhere I locked the viral episode, some visitors demonstrate with their sour wisdoms to ignore the existence of irony. That ignorance, a prosperous creator of misunderstandings, is on its way to being the evil of our century.