the Odalisque myths: irony or maybe not

The running condition of these debates, stated as a perceptual fact. Marathe cannot tell whether Steeply means anything — and earlier he cannot decide whether even Steeply's "horrid pronunciation" is "an intentional irritant." That undecidability is the defining property of the ironic register: it is unfalsifiable, permanently deniable, never quite pinnable as serious or not, and that unpinnable quality is itself the weapon. To the single-entendre man, what discomfits is not any particular jab but the structural impossibility of knowing where the other person actually stands. Irony's deepest cruelty is that it withholds the very thing sincerity offers — a locatable self that means what it says.