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If your understanding of irony is limited to 1995 Alanis Morrisette levels (or backlash thereof) you may not be aware that there are actually different subsets of the concept. At its base concept, irony is a matter of unexpected outcomes or juxtapositions: for example, the song’s line of “10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife” does not by itself fit the basic definition. However, if you went to an International Knife Convention and all the displays were about spoons, that would be highly ironic. I have personally been to “comic conventions” where the offerings of comics are sparse to non-existent, and that is ironic. Putting a convicted embezzler in charge of your corporation’s finances is ironic, and also very probably not a good idea.
But anyhow, once you understand the basics of irony, you learn there are flavors of irony beyond the basic, one of which is dramatic irony. I may have discussed it in one of my previous blogs, but for discussion’s sake I’m bringing it up again. Dramatic irony is a tension caused in fiction by the audience knowing something the characters do not, like an oblivious Character A being alone in a room with another character who we know is The Murderer(tm), especially when Character A brings up some crucial piece of evidence and The Murderer asks that age-old loaded question, “Who else knows about this?” and we’re now screaming at the book or screen for Character A to answer “Uhm… everyone! Told lotsa people, yep! Got a tape set to go live on the news at 6pm tonight if I don’t key in the secret code!” but no, Character A answers “just you and me” and they’re not long for this mortal coil.
Dramatic irony can be torturous to suffer through, especially if the writer cannot resist things like a lady on the deck of the Titanic shouting, “Oh darling, this ship is to die for!” But the unspoken compact is that it will eventually be smoothed out and brought in line — the characters at last also knowing what we know — and that provides some level of catharsis, ideally a powerful enough catharsis to justify all of our squirming. Stories with happy endings and tragic endings both indulge in dramatic irony and it really just comes down to a matter of timing: do the characters realize what the audience knows in time, or a moment too late to stop something irreversible? If Iago’s perfidy is uncovered before Othello kills Desdemona, if Romeo gets the crucial message that Juliet is only faking her death, then those plays end very differently. Then again there’s the example of Oedipus Rex where the irreversible actions (kill father, marry mother) have already occurred before the play even begins and the whole thing is just us waiting for the horrific realizations that will come to pass as Oedipus investigates the murder of the previous king Laius. The Greek tragedies are hardcore like that.
Sometimes dramatic irony smooths itself out in catastrophic fashion, a crashing wave after a steadily rising tide, like the climax of Hamlet which leaves the stage infamously strewn with both dead bodies and confessions. Sometimes it happens in smaller stages, puzzle pieces slowly clicking into place. With Zombie Ranch I’ve been erring towards the latter method, and additionally keeping some details held back from the readers so that reader and character ideally might make some discoveries (or at least confirm suspicions) in a simultaneous fashion. It may or may not work out depending on the reader in question but some of my personal favorite moments in fiction aren’t just outguessing (or “outknowing”) the character(s) but “being there” with them as the puzzle finally becomes clear. I gasp, they gasp, and hopefully there’s enough time left to avert tragedy (since despite all possible appearances to the contrary, I remain a sucker for happy endings). But even if it all ends in blood and tears like those Delphic foretellings so often did, achieving those moments where the dramatic irony collapses in a moving way sure does make for a good story.