quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage. Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. Its critical and destructive, a ground-clearing.[I]ronys singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.
