Fairy Tales
“The Crocodile Without Any Tail” begins like a fairy tale by beginning with “Once upon a time…” And the narrative plays out like a fairy tale, as well. But it all leads to a jarringly ironic conclusion:
“The news of this extravagant heroism spread through the fair, everybody came to visit the tent, not only the thousands of sightseers but also the very stall-holders of the fair themselves. As you can imagine the children earned a large fortune.”
Maine
The author takes a pen overflowing with corrosive irony to an entire United State in the story “In Maine: Green’s Colony” that is also dazzlingly funny. The opening line is ironic, and the wave just builds from there to become snarky tsunami that floods everything which follows. Best of all the individual lines of ironic humor, however, may well be this delightfully prickly stick in the neck:
“Maine still wears corsets and starches, whitewashes because of what is underneath.”
True Snark
Yes, there is no getting around this fact. The ironic content found most often in the work of Loy is that of the snarky kind. Of course, it can be easy to miss for some, perhaps. Such as the ending of what appears to actually be not a poem, but a critical commentary about “All the Laughs In One Short Story by McAlmon”
“She chortled cutely again
, and she merely rattled her machine laugh,
again to chortle dry rattling laughter
`I love her laugh.’”
Birth Control
The term birth control can refer to contraceptive devices when said with the accent on one of those words. When the accent is placed on the other word, however, it can refer to external autonomy over procreation. There is an example of how Loy’s irony runs well past snark into political outrage:
“She stood out among the working classes as the perfect exemplaire of wife and mother—her home, husband, children were well cared for—her terror of having another child—was financially sound—in her plan one addition to her family would have broken entirely down the civilised condition—to which as practical Idealists they clung.”
“Gertrude Stein”
Arguably, no doubt, the single greatest use of irony in the canon of Loy is that reserved for the judgment she pronounces upon another famous feminist author of the time, Gertrude Stein. The use of irony is perhaps at its best on those occasions when two people can read a statement with one understanding it one way and the other misunderstanding it in the complete opposite way. This is an example of that:
“Gertrude Stein is not a writer in any of the currently accepted senses of the word.”
