Thread by @17cShyteposter

Reminder that "irony" is, historically traced, pretty much the case of "being out of favor of the gods."

There is almost no irony in the Sumerian myths, or the Vedas, and only starting to emerge in the Homeric epics, or in the Germanic Beowulf etc

The Greeks certainly did, they had a grasp of it in Homeric times, and as they reassembled themselves, the Classical Greeks perfected it: to the point where the Romans created the first ironic novel, the Satyricon

In the "Dark Ages," irony was then dead for centuries

Even the irony of Beowulf was Greek in nature, an ironic falling out with the gods, until a fully unironic hero emerged to kill the demons of chaos. The banishment of dragons and monsters.

This persisted for centuries until the writing of Don Quijote, a man literally "tilting at windmills," widely considered the first modern novel: the ironic story of a ridiculous fool

As in, a man at war with illusions; the gods are long dead, it's ironic he tilts at them

Shakespeare perfected dramatic irony just after, that's why he's the GOAT. He was able to somehow reproduce the Greco-Roman era of great men fighting against gods/destiny, in a much later era

The last mythopoeic author until maybe Tolkien

"Irony" has thus become a smaller and smaller concept over time, like Bakhtin said, first a struggle of mortals against the gods, then as we abandoned gods, against... well, increasingly smaller and smaller stakes

Which is to say nothing, which is where we are now

Which is why all writing is now "irony," a nothingness, a Gawker-land of 95% ironic attacks against the last small bastions of the gods, which they hate

When everything divine has been thrown away, all that's left is human mockery. Modern "irony" is the device of the inhuman.