'It Has a Kind of Toughness'

Asked why wit was so characteristic of British writing, at least as of 1998, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald replied: 

“Wit means self-concealment, meiosis, self-deprecation, a recognition that things are too desperate to be comic but not serious enough to be tragic, a successful attempt to make language (and silence) take charge of the situation, and all these are British habits.”

 

Sometimes you want to be blunt, whether or not you are British. You want to eliminate any lingering hint of ambiguity in what you wish to say. Your purpose is to dismiss or even hurt the object of your displeasure. You have no wish to be understanding or empathetic. You already understand. Your target hasn’t earned an imaginative projection into tolerance. You don’t even try to be tactful. Nazis and Hamas don’t deserve your sensitive insights.

 

But most of a morally healthy person’s emotional life is not consumed with such hatred. Most of us are not the world’s policemen. To conduct our time on earth as though we were surrounded daily by felons in need of chastisement is childish, tiresome and self-defeating. We risk becoming what we abhor. Fitzgerald’s definition of wit, that elusive quality some of us recognize and appreciate when we see it, suggests we maintain a distance between ourselves and our petulant inner child. It is the deft deployment of language. “Self-concealment,” for instance, suggests maintaining a cool distance, not indulging in easy emotional gratification, deploying a scalpel rather than a bazooka.

 

Meiosis is the rhetorical device with which we intensify by minimizing. We understate and make something smaller and less important than it actually is. Again, another step in self-concealment. This is why one of Dr. Johnson’s definitions of wit is “imagination; quickness of fancy.” Think of the wittiest writers in the language – Alexander Pope, Evelyn Waugh, Fitzgerald herself, et al.

 

In his essay on Andrew Marvell, T.S. Eliot says of wit: “It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused with erudition because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in generations of experience; and it is confused with cynicism because it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience.”

 

Truly cynical wit soon grows tiresome and ineffective. Think of true wit as muted mockery. The sting it packs may be time-delayed but it will last.