Irony, the Muppets, David Foster Wallace, and the punishment of the post-modern subject in Tropic of Orange

Unfortunately I managed to forget to post by the deadline last night. I’m not sure if it’s possible to get partial credit for these postings; either way I figured I’d try to contribute something anyhow, in part because I’ve had a thought rolling around in my head since our class discussion on Thursday regarding Emi’s death.

Someone (I think, I might be misremembering) proposed the idea that she was being narratively punished in some way for being a sort of liberated or modern woman (or something to that effect). The more I consider this, the more I disagree. First of all, as we agreed in class, she has no more agency (and indeed perhaps less) than Rafaela turns out to have in the animalistic showdown with her pursuer. Therefore, I would summarily disagree with the assertion that Emi is the butt of a type of narrative punishment for stepping outside of her boundaries as a woman.

However, I am beginning to think that her death nevertheless does symbolize a type of punishment. In my mind though, it’s almost exactly the opposite, she is punished for not allowing herself enough freedom or agency, for loving too much what holds her down in culture.

There is a quote that David Foster Wallace cited regularly (though he could never attribute it to an original source, and I’ve not been able to find it) that says, more or less, “irony is the song of the bird that’s come to love its cage.” It is my argument that Emi, in her position as basically the most clearly post-modern subject in Tropic of Orange, is like the bird that has come to love its cage. She is preemptively dismissive and ironic about almost everything she comes in to contact with, for instance, with her constant assertions that “cultural diversity is bullshit” or that various things including Gabriel’s interest in film noir (and thereby, by association, his pursuit of knowledge) are “passé” (128, 18). It’s also probably important that she is associated with the decidedly more post-modern medium of television.

For the most part Emi is limited to expressing her opinions in negatives, which is also the issue with pervasive irony; it’s impossible to pin down the ironist on exactly where he stands, since he only claims that everything is passé or bad. He makes no attempts to escape from or transcend the boundaries put on him by society (in the case of Tropic of Orange this largely has to do with class and racial boundaries), instead dismissing attempts by others as futile and childish.

There’s a scene in the recent Muppets movie that illustrates this for me (I’ll admit I might be over reading in to it because I recently found out that Roland Barthes had a writing credit on the first movie- to be fair, though, there are a lot of pretty post-modern moves in that first one at least). Toward the end of the film when the Muppets are putting on a stage show in order to raise money, a group of Muppets perform a barbershop quartet version of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to the angry shouts (e.g. “You’re ruining it”) of a tied up Jack Black. Jack Black is tied up literally because of the figurative limits he imposes on himself by way of his negative and ironic stance with respect to the Muppets attempts at a positive act. Emi is similar to this; she is punished not because she oversteps her boundaries, but in fact because she refuses to do so by shielding herself in irony.