In the Cut

I don't usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake. But Cornelius was having trouble with irony. The whole class was having trouble with irony. They do much better with realism. Realism, they think, is simply a matter of imitating Ernest Hemingway. Short flat sentences, an adjective before every noun. Ernest Hemingway himself, the idea of him that they have from the writing, makes them uncomfortable. They disapprove of him. They don't like him or the white hunter in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." The bravado, the resentment in the writing excites them, but they cannot allow themselves to feel it. Hemingway, they've decided, Hemingway, the person, isn't cool. I considered giving them Naipaul to read, A Bend in the River or Guerrillas, but I decided that they would be so sensibly outraged by the beating, murdering and dismemberment of women that they might not be able to see the intelligence in the books. I wondered if they would like Graham Greene. Brighton Rock perhaps. But I had forgotten, I don't know how, the dream in which the murderer, straight razor in hand, says only two words: "Such tits." Stream of consciousness, which some of them thought at first was stream of conscienceness, doesn't seem to give them much trouble. They think it's like writing down your dreams except without punctuation. Some of them admitted that before completing the Virginia Woolf assignment they'd smoked a little dope and it had helped. They make these confessions to me in a shyly flirtatious way, as if they were trying to seduce me. Which, of course, they are. Not sexually, but almost sexually. It would be sexual if they knew any better. And someday they will. Know better. But irony terrifies them. To begin with, they don't understand it. It's not easy to explain irony. Either you get it or you don't. I am reduced to giving examples, like the baby who is saved from death in the emergency room only to be hit by a bus on the way home. That helps a little. Cornelius said that he preferred realism to irony because irony turned conceived wisdom on its head. Whether he meant to say conventional wisdom or received wisdom, I don't know. I was so distracted by an image of wisdom being turned on its head that I simply nodded and let him go on. Irony is like ranking someone or something, he said, but no one knows for sure you're doing it. That's close enough, I said. I am beginning to sound like one of the spinster ladies who used to take an interest in me in boarding school, except that they used to bemoan (a word they often used) the lack of manners, civility, and the incidence of haphazard breeding, rather than illiteracy. I hope that I don't turn into Miss Burgess in her good Donegal tweed suit, her snappish red terrier at heel, the dog's own tweed coat beginning to fray where it rubbed against his tartan leash. Summers in Maine with her companion Miss Gerrold in a cottage fragrant with mold. It doesn't seem that bad, now that I'm imagining it. Hydrangeas. Blueberries. Sketching on the rocks. I admitted to my students that I am writing a book about regionalisms and dialects, including the eccentricities of pronunciation. I want them to know that I am not against dialect, or even misusage. I like it. I like that kids now think that Nike is a word of one syllable. Why wouldn't they? Nike isn't a goddess. It's a shoe. The winged shoe of victory. Despite my interest in idiomatic language, however, I do not want them to use phonetic spelling. I do not want to see motherfucker spelled mothafucka. Not yet. Get it right first, I said, then you can do whatever you like. It's like jazz. First learn to play the instrument. Cornelius raised his hand last Tuesday and asked, I'm afraid, if I did not think my book on slang was a diss. A diss to whom? I asked. Stressing the whom. Cornelius waited for me at the end of class. The othersMoore, Susanna is the author of 'In the Cut' with ISBN 9780679422587 and ISBN 0679422587.