Abstract
This paper introduces the idea that aging inclines us naturally toward an ironic stance on life. The conscious cultivation of that stance through some form of narrative reflection is linked to the development of wisdom, where wisdom is understood in terms of deepened knowledge of the “stories” of our lives. Such reflection heightens our awareness of the inherently ironic nature of our inner world—a complex, quasi-literary world toward which we occupy multiple points of view. In exploring these ideas, the concept of narrative foreclosure is discussed, as is that of “positive aging.”
I wish to introduce an idea which, more fully developed, can enrich our understanding of the psychology of later life. With advancing years, I propose, there develops rather naturally within us a progressively more ironic stance toward the inner material of our lives, as toward Life in general. Fed by age-related changes on a variety of levels, and suitably nurtured through autobiographical reflection, a heightened sense of irony can play a subtle but vital role in meeting the challenges of later life with openness, resilience, and deepened self-awareness—in short, with “a good strong story” (Randall, 2013; Randall & McKim, 2008, p. 118). Its conscious cultivation plays a role, therefore, in growing old (versus merely getting old) and in that time-honored (if ill-defined) capacity called wisdom. While such a stance can be the case at any age, by virtue of our being self-conscious creatures aware of the gap between present and past, event and meaning, the conditions of later life are conducive to its becoming more explicit.
I begin with a brief overview of a narrative perspective on aging to set the stage for a discussion of irony itself. This is followed by a consideration of how aging renders us more ironic on several levels, culminating in biographical aging. I then explore the links between irony, aging, and wisdom, concluding with some thoughts on the relevance of an ironic stance to “positive aging” (M. Gergen & Gergen, 2003), plus some questions for further consideration.
Lives as texts: A narrative perspective on growing old
In suggesting that the cultivation of an ironic stance plays a role in both wisdom and positive aging, I am influenced by the turn toward narrative that has been making its way across a range of disciplines—not just psychology, but my own field too: gerontology. In contrast to mainstream approaches to understanding aging, a narrative gerontology is concerned with the “inside” of aging, or with its biographical as opposed to, say, biological dimensions (Birren, Kenyon, Ruth, Schroots, & Svensson, 1996; Kenyon, Bohlmeijer, & Randall, 2011). As such, it views the “inner material of our lives” in essentially textual terms. It views it as “texistence” (Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 95–113): a complex, quasi-literary, narrative construction we are continually “composing” (Bateson, 1989) in memory and imagination from the experiences that constitute our lives. It views it as “the story of my life.”
Working with Erikson’s concept of “identity,” psychologist Dan McAdams (2001) insists simply that “identity is a life story” (p. 643), namely “an internalized and evolving personal myth that functions to provide life with unity and purpose” (McAdams, 1996, p. 132). It is a myth–story–text that reaches both forward into our future (toward The End) and backward to our past (toward The Beginning) and, ultimately, is inseparable from our sense of self (see Bruner & Kalmar, 1998; Kerby, 1991; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006; Polkinghorne, 1988; Ricoeur, 1991). As proponents of narrative therapy would say (White & Epston, 1990), it is a myth–story–text which lives us as much as we live it. Of relevance to my argument here, it is a lived novel that features in its fashion such elements as plot, theme, character, and genre (Randall, 1999). Rather than something which we story in a vacuum, though, it is interwoven with and co-authored within an intricate web of “narrative environments” (Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 50–57) consisting of the families, friendships, communities, and cultures in which our selves have been uniquely shaped. It is a text, then, that is “structurally and interpretively open” (Linde, 1993, p. 31); that, publicly and privately, in an anecdote here or a summing-up there, we are forever “rewriting” (Freeman, 1993); a text whose meanings are therefore fluid in nature. Psychologist Mark Freeman, much of whose work explores “the poetics of selfhood” (1999), captures the point nicely: “Our lives [are] like richly ambiguous texts to be interpreted and understood … whose meanings are inexhaustible, whose mysterious existence ceaselessly calls forth the desire to know, whose readings cannot ever yield a final closure” (Freeman, 1993, p. 184).
Until quite recently, however, psychologists of aging have paid scant attention to the narrative complexity of later life, or to “the ironies of self-reflection” (K. Gergen, 1992) which aging invites, let alone to irony itself as an element of wisdom (see Ardelt, 1997; Jeste et al., 2010; Sternberg, 1990). In theory, gerontology is committed to looking at aging from the perspective of the humanities as much as that of the sciences. At least, this was the vision of its founders (see Achenbaum, 2010). In reality, as colleagues in literary gerontology (Wyatt-Brown, 2000), critical gerontology (Ray & Cole, 2008), and qualitative gerontology (Rowles & Schoenberg, 2002) will attest, contributions from the humanities are often seen as “soft” and “unscientific” and thus subjected to unduly brisk critique when submitted to mainstream gerontological journals. Although, happily, things are changing, gerontology remains committed—however unwittingly—to a medical-empirical paradigm of aging as, at base, “a problem to be solved” (Cole, 1992, p. 241).
Unfortunately, such a paradigm leaves the internal world of the aging person—the world in which the average aging person is arguably most interested—all but unexplored. By spinning a thin story of the experience of aging, academic gerontology can therefore be of limited assistance in preparing one for “the philosophic homework” (Schacter-Shalomi & Miller, 1995, pp. 124–126) that later life assigns. Instead, our understanding of that experience is restricted to assessments of losses and declines in what I call the mechanics of cognition, including the mechanics of memory—which fails to encompass, for instance, the subtle shifts in the interplay between memory, metaphor, and meaning, and, because of this interplay, in the development of wisdom (Randall, 2011). As in the old joke about the chap seen puttering beneath the streetlamp searching for his keys, when he suspects all along that they’re lying in the ditch nearby, the focus of gerontology has been kept on things that can be quantified … “because that’s where the light is.” On the whole, our discipline remains remarkably earnest—not ironic—in the implicit conviction that guides much research within it, namely that by measuring this, that, and the other, the meaning of aging will in due course be revealed (see Cole & Gadow, 1986).
A narrative approach to aging, or a poetics of aging, permits a thicker picture of older adults’ inner worlds. Viewing “a life” as an ever-changing, multi-leveled, polysemous text opens up a space for considering a host of fascinating topics that, apart from analyses of literary works on aging themes or by aging authors, are easily eclipsed. Among these is aging and irony.
Defining irony: Toward a positive ironic stance
Irony is a complex concept with a complex history (see Booth, 1974; Hutcheon, 1994). Understandings of it range from that of saying one thing while meaning something else to seeing it as the distinguishing genre of postmodernity (K. Gergen, 1992; Gibbs, 1994; Hutcheon, 1989, 1992; Prickett, 2002). In contrast to modernity, with its implicit commitment to certainty and control, irony concerns the acceptance (if not embracing) of ambiguity and relativity, contingency and contradiction, plus the mistrust of the grand master narratives of politics, science, and religion.
Might I propose here that old age itself, whenever it begins (60, 70, 80), be thought of as the postmodern phase of our lives as individuals, in which case irony is the genre, the “narrative tone” (McAdams, 1996, p. 136), that suits that phase best? If innocence characterizes childhood, that is, and earnestness is the mark of adulthood, with all its striving to make our way in the world, then irony, as an over-arching orientation, goes more naturally with later life, the stage in which, more than any other, we are confronted by the limits of our being and the fog of mystery that surrounds it. The possibility, though, that old age is not just “the age of irony” (Gibbs, 1994, p. 370) but “the narrative phase par excellence” (Freeman, 1997, p. 394), when making sense of our story is increasingly important, invites us to look at irony from a narrative perspective as well.
Irony, notes Stephen Prickett in Narrative, Religion, and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony (2002), is “endemic to narrative” (p. 42), “the essence of narrative art” (p. 38). To quote Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in their classic work The Nature of Narrative (1966), it is “built into the narrative form as it is in no other form of literature” (p. 240). More specifically, “the narrative situation is ineluctably ironic” owing to the “disparity of viewpoint” in “the relationship between the teller and the tale, the teller and the audience” (p. 240). In the case of a life-narrative, the disparity at issue pertains to the stories that are integral to our identity: stories we are inside of as teller, tale, and audience—narrator and narratee—more or less at once. And irony is associated with our awareness of disparity among the multiple interpretations of “the stories we are” (Randall, 1995), which is where wisdom enters in—viewed, that is, in narrative terms (see Randall & Kenyon, 2001, 2002). Reflecting on the older women in the life-writing group she discusses in her book Beyond Nostalgia (2000), gerontologist Ruth Ray suggests that “a person is truly ‘wise’ when she is able to see life as an evolving story and to create some distance between self and story by reflecting on it from multiple perspectives” (p. 29).
So far, I have been implying that the ironizing trend is positive at heart. Yet as literary scholar Linda Hutcheon reminds us in Irony’s Edge (1994), irony can go either way, positive or negative. While at one end of the spectrum an ironic stance on life can result in openness, playfulness, and wonder, at the other, it can issue in pessimism and despair. I am reminded here of the distinction between “affirmative postmodernism” and “skeptical postmodernism” (Rosenau, 1992, pp. 14–17), or between “narrative openness” and “narrative foreclosure” (Bohlmeijer, Westerhof, Randall, Tromp, & Kenyon, 2011).
Narrative foreclosure, says Freeman (2000), “is the premature conviction that one’s life story has effectively ended” (p. 83), that upon retirement, for instance (though narrative foreclosure is by no means limited to later life), no new themes or chapters are apt to open up. As such, foreclosure may be a factor in depression. Narrative openness, by contrast, is characterized by the sense that, despite the setbacks and struggles in one’s life and the prospect of its coming to an end, one’s story isn’t over. There’s always something new to be experienced: a relationship to nurture, a discovery to be made, a lesson to be learned. There is somewhere still to grow. Biologically, there is a built-in limit to our life (120 years, give or take), but biographically, there is none whatsoever to our story, no necessary endpoint to our narrative development.
Just as both skeptical and affirmative postmodernism are predicated on the critique of modernity, so narrative foreclosure and narrative openness—not simply as concepts but as approaches to our world—assume the storied complexity of our lives. In the same vein, both negative and positive irony—narrative irony, that is—are functions of the disparity of viewpoints and the multiplicity of meaning within the stories of our lives. The difference is that, in the case of positive irony, one does not despair because of the uncertainty. One experiences in it, not “a metaphysical agoraphobia before the endlessly overlapping horizons of one’s possible being,” in sociologist Peter Berger’s words (1963, p. 63), but what culture studies critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette (2004) calls “the thrill of narrative freedom” (p. 158). In my own work with older adults, inviting them to explore their life stories through some form of “narrative care” (Bohlmeijer, Kenyon, & Randall, 2011), this is a thrill that I am keen to help them taste. Providing opportunities to cultivate a sense of (positive) irony toward their lives is central to that process.
A word is in order here about how a narrative perspective itself inserts a wedge between our life as such and the stories that we weave around it. It opens an ironic gap between our experiences per se and the ways we typically interpret them. What is more, “the story of my life,” vast as it is, cannot account for everything we have done or seen, inasmuch as we forget far more than we ever remember. The bulk of our existence goes virtually unnoticed, and to that extent unstoried. Awareness of this gap—between existence and texistence, between raw life and story of life—is the entry point for irony.
Minding the gaps: Sources of irony in later life
Central to my thesis in this paper is that aging itself pushes us (and our stories of us) to be more ironic. To borrow from Robert Coles (1974), irony enters “the mind’s life” (in this case, the aging mind’s life) in proportion to our awareness of disparity—to our “minding the gap,” as our UK colleagues might put it—on a range of overlapping levels.
The physical level
Contrary to Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, human beings are embodied selves. With advancing years, however, and the conditions they carry with them on the physical front, the bond between body and self can undergo a shift. A gap can open up between them. Less readily will our bodies do our bidding. We dream of parachuting from a plane, braving rapids in a raft, or doing any other of the daring deeds we’ve added to our bucket list, yet our jittery joints and weakening limbs assure us this will never be. Increasingly, our ailments and impairments render our bodies uncooperative—our nemesis almost, the antagonist (versus protagonist) in the story of our life. “Nothing in us works well,” complains Florida Scott-Maxwell (1968), writing in her 80s; “our flagging bodies … have become unreliable. We have to make an effort to do the simplest things” (p. 35). Such impairments, especially those affecting our sex lives, often figure in the humor which aging can inspire. While it is true that many aging jokes are blatantly ageist, many are enjoyed—if not generated—by older adults themselves. Such humor supplies them with a welcome chuckle and puts things in perspective. It helps them rise above their situation by mediating the message that age is not the unmitigated tragedy which, physically, it can seem. As such, it reaffirms their dignity by affording them an affectionate detachment from their infirmity and mortality.
The social level
With age, the gap can grow greater in our minds between our immediate concerns and those that drive the wider world. With spouses, friends, and others dying off, we experience a gradual disengagement from the society we’ve identified with to date (Achenbaum & Bengston, 1994). The world story continues on, so to speak, while our own role within it grows ever more minor. With this can come a growing sense of alienation—a sense exacerbated by diminished independence and (eventually perhaps) relocation to an institution. Awareness of disparity can also come as aging pushes us to step back from the lives we’ve lived till now and discern our several roles along the way (sibling, partner, parent); to appreciate how “one man in his time plays many parts” (Shakespeare, 1623/1993, Act II, Scene VII).
For some of us, the ironic stance arises as we assess our various assumptions about ourselves, or Life, or Love—a theme with added relevance given that over 50 percent of older adults display a “dismissive” attitude when asked about the importance of intimate relationships in their lives (Webster, 1997). It might even be argued that older persons from impoverished populations are inherently more practiced at experiencing life ironically, given their lifelong awareness of disparities between the have-nots and the haves. Such a possibility bears considering in connection with studies of exceptional “resilience” among members of minorities (Becker & Newsom, 2004).
The developmental level
Development in general, it can be argued, is fueled by awareness of the gaps between the realities of our lives and the illusions or assumptions we’ve embraced along the way. For psychologist Roger Gould (1978), development is “a [lifelong] process of shedding a whole network of assumptions, rules, fantasies, irrationalities, and rigidities that tie us to our childhood consciousness” (p. 11). Specifically, it involves moving beyond “four major false assumptions” (p. 39)—four grand narratives, as it were—namely: (a) we’ll always live with our parents and be their child, (b) they’ll always be there to help when we can’t do something on our own, (c) their simplified version of our complicated inner reality is correct, and (d) there is no real death or evil in the world.
Even though “by the time we enter adulthood,” says Gould (1978), “we know that these assumptions are factually incorrect, … they retain hidden control of our adult experience until significant events reveal them as emotional as well as intellectual fallacies” (p. 39). Such a view is pertinent to development in later adulthood too, when the losses and declines that aging carries with it on the physical front can disabuse us of a further two illusions: “my body will always be my friend” and “I will live forever.” For Gould, development goes hand in hand with disillusionment. “Disllusion is the chief characteristic of old age,” notes Schopenhauer in a somewhat darker mood, “for by that time the fictions are gone which gave life its charm and spurred on the mind to activity; the splendors of the world have proved null and vain; its pomp, grandeur, and magnificence are faded” (cited in Cole & Winkler, 1994, p. 43).
Jane Loevinger (1976) proposes that what she calls ego development is characterized from stage to stage (though progress is by no means automatic nor linked specifically to age) by a widening gap between self-centered orientations on our lives and more other-centered ones instead. At these more altruistic stages, we can accept that the storyworlds of other selves are as intricate as our own, and can view our lives more easily in the context of those who preceded us in the past and will succeed us in the future. Working with Loevinger’s model in researching the “narrative complexity” of people’s self-accounts, McAdams (1988) has found, for instance, “a significant relationship … between ego stage and irony” (p. 125). Both “men and women at higher ego stages,” he says, “construct more complex (differentiated) life stories” which “reveal more variety in plot forms, typically integrating a number of disparate actions” (p. 128). Similar to Loevinger, Lawrence Kohlberg (1984) speaks of moral development as a process of progressive “de-centering.” And in terms of faith development, the developmental journey traces a similar trajectory from lower stages to higher ones in James Fowler’s (1981) six-stage schema, with Stage 5, in particular, marked by “the rise of the ironic imagination” (p. 198).
Erik Erikson, speculating on the later stages of psychosocial development, captures the kind of ironizing trend—the awareness of paradox and contradiction, of unanswerable questions and uncloseable gaps—that I’m arguing comes as second nature in the second half of life. In Vital Involvement in Old Age, the book he wrote with his wife Joan and colleague Helen Kivnick near the end of his life, this is expressed as follows:
Burdened by physical limitations and confronting a personal future that may seem more inescapably finite than ever before, those nearing the end of the life cycle find themselves struggling to accept the inalterability of the past and the unknowability of the future, to acknowledge possible mistakes and omissions, and to balance consequent despair with the sense of overall integrity that is essential to carrying on. (Erikson, Erikson, & Kivnick, 1986, p. 56)
It is Erikson et al.’s definition of wisdom, in particular, that captures best the essence of the ironizing trend: “Wisdom is detached concern with life itself, in the face of death itself. It maintains and learns to convey the integrity of experience, in spite of the decline of bodily and mental functions” (pp. 37–38). In the final pages of his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Carl Jung gives expression to the complex state of heart which this definition envisions:
I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. … There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions—not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. (p. 358)
The cognitive level
Fueling the emergence of an ironic stance in later life, and impelling our movement through the stages of development (ego, moral, etc.), may be changes in the wiring of our brains themselves. Shifts in the functioning of our left and right hemispheres, proposes gerontologist Gene Cohen (2005), are responsible not just for a better balance between our thoughts and our feelings over time, but for an increased capacity for “postformal thought” (pp. 36–38).
Paralleling the rise of postmodern consciousness on the societal front, postformal thought (sometimes called “dialectical thought”) is a mode of cognition we grow more capable of in later life. To an extent less natural at earlier stages of development, such a mode enables us to tolerate the contradictions and ambiguities that run through our lives, to appreciate multiple sides to any issue, and to hold the yin and yang of things in tension (see Ardelt, 1997). It also equips us to accept the relativity of our knowledge, including our self-knowledge. At the same time, it renders us more open to myth, metaphor, and story, and to the multiple interpretations such ways of knowing inspire. Based on her research into “how younger and older adults interpret text,” psychologist Gisela Labouvie-Vief (1990) observes, for instance, that the older reader “construes text not only logically but also psychologically and symbolically” (p. 69). Thus her conclusion that, in later life, “the symbolic emerges … in a uniquely mature form,” and is accepted “as an independent source of knowing in its own right” (p. 74).
The spiritual level
The view of wisdom as “detached concern with life itself in the face of death itself” (Erikson et al., 1986, p. 37) speaks to the role that is played in the evolution of our consciousness by awareness of our mortality, by mindfulness of the gap between the limits of our aging body and the yearnings of our “ageless self” (Kaufman, 1986). This view of wisdom suggests a further level on which the ironizing trend pertains: the spiritual level. Again, I draw from Florida Scott-Maxwell, whose musings in The Measure of My Days (1968) reflect an ambivalence that is similar to Jung’s. “Age,” she begins, “is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high. If it is a long defeat it is also a victory” (p. 5). And in the closing pages, she voices the sense of possibility amid uncertainty, of adventure almost, that later life can bring. “We [older adults] are people to whom something important is about to happen,” she writes. “All is uncharted and uncertain, we seem to lead the way into the unknown” (p. 139).
Lars Tornstam (1996) proposes the term gerotranscendence for what Scott-Maxwell is describing. He sees it as a stage of development which emerges in very late life especially in which the boundaries between Life and Death become increasingly ambiguous, as do those between Self and Other, Past and Future. We experience ourselves as living in “the centre of the moment” (Waxman, 1997), taking one day at a time. And we sense that we are living on the edge, before a horizon that broadens out beyond our personal concerns to take in those of past and future generations, indeed of the planet as a whole. We feel ourselves to be living in a cosmic context even, in which the very atoms of our bodies are as ancient as the universe itself. “We are all billion-year-olds, no matter when we were born,” notes biogerontologist Leonard Hayflick (1994), “and celebrating birthdays is absurd” (p. 18).
Concurrent with gerotranscendence—hard evidence for which, admittedly, has yet to be provided—is the trend observed among many older adults to become disenchanted (if not disillusioned) with the grand narratives of organized religion. Even if they continue to participate in religious observances and find meaning in the symbols of their home tradition, they develop a more “take it or leave it” attitude to particular teachings (Bianchi, 2005). In short, they are drawn to spirituality instead, which is seen to be broader in scope, as concerned with “the universe story” (Swimme & Berry, 1992). With greater interest in spirituality comes greater openness to any number of enduring questions to which the pat answers of religion can seem increasingly restrictive. There comes a greater capacity for “living the uncertainty and celebrating it” (Blanchard-Fields & Norris, 1995, p. 116).
The biographical level
On several levels, aging prompts in us an ironizing trend. This trend is pivotal to adapting to the challenges of later life, pivotal to growing old and not just getting old, and pivotal to wisdom. It is on the biographical level, however, that the roots of this trend run the deepest. If selves are embodied, then they are storied too, and amid their storied complexity lies ample opportunity for irony to emerge.
A narrative perspective on aging is centered on the conviction that human beings are hermeneutical beings. Compared to other species with which we share the planet (or so it would seem), we are forever employing language and imagination to make sense of what is going on, which is of course where irony enters in, for irony and meaning are intimate companions (Prickett, 2002, p. 221). With each meaning we glean from a given event, a dozen others can be gleaned in hindsight (Freeman, 2010). Awareness of the unfixedness of meaning is ironic by definition. Given, though, that a principal mode of making meaning is through spinning stories, big and small (Bamberg, 2006), then the potential for ironic awareness is woven ever tighter into the fabric of experience.
My thesis in this article is that, though a potential within us all as storied creatures and though instilled on other levels besides the biographical, ironic awareness can be—should be—nurtured even more. Indeed, its intentional cultivation in later life, when we tend to have more time to commit to it anyway, not to mention more texistence on which to reflect, can enrich our relationship with ourselves, as with others, in important ways, contributing a quality of resilience and openness to our experience of the world (Randall, 2013).
The activity of telling our story—which is to say, getting it outside ourselves where we can more easily examine it—is central to furthering the ironizing trend that aging will be seeding in us anyway. The more intent we are on living the examined life, the more ironic our sense of self will grow. That said, “telling our story” is scarcely a straightforward endeavor, nor one which all of us will have the energy or encouragement to undertake. When we do, however, the experience affords us a bigger picture of our life, a deeper appreciation of our achievements, an affectionate acceptance of our defeats, and a compassionate assessment of ourselves as having done the best we could with the hand Fate dealt us and the conditions in which our lives were shaped. In the course of facilitating “ego integrity,” to use Erikson’s term, it permits “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions” (Erikson, 1963, p. 268).
In telling our story—whether orally to a therapist or friend, or in writing, as a memoir or a life review—the ironizing trend is intensified, for it makes us mindful of what author Sharon Butala (2005) calls “the memorist’s quandary.” The memoirist’s quandary “begins with choosing the story the memoir is going to tell” (p. 47) and “includes the discovery of all the many selves, all the many possibilities of stories, from which one has to choose” (p. 49).
Kate de Medeiros’s research on life-writing groups with older adults (2007, 2011) sheds light on Butala’s quandary, and points to the positive possibilities it holds for healing and growth. Members of the group are invited to write about particular experiences—especially poignant ones or painful ones, for instance—using a range of literary genres: first-person narration or third-person story, a poem or a letter. “Using different forms [to explore the same episode] opens up different possibilities for the narrator and allows different types of stories to be told” (de Medeiros & Lagay, 2000, p. 14).
Exercises of this type exploit our capacity for postformal thought, for looking at things from multiple angles and not being troubled by the open-endedness of the process. Quite the opposite: They can excite us with the thrill of narrative freedom and entice us to go deeper. They constitute what Sally Chandler and Ruth Ray (2002) call “dynamic reminiscence,” or what researchers in the Netherlands call “creative reminiscence.” Creative reminiscence encourages older adults “to create and discover metaphors, images, and stories that symbolically represent the subjective and inner meaning or their lives” (Bohlmeijer, Valenkamp, Westerhof, Smit, & Cuijpers, 2005, p. 302), the result often being a reduction in depression and improvement in their sense of mastery (see Bohlmeijer, Kramer, Smit, Onrust, & Marwijk, 2009). In a similar vein, programs of “guided autobiography,” like those psychologists Jim Birren and Donna Deutchman have pioneered, invite participants to employ “creative metaphors and poetry” to “express … indirectly that which might be difficult to express directly in more conventional ways.” In the process, “a person can gain distance from the emotionally difficult and develop an increased sense of mastery” (Birren & Deutchman, 1991, p. 81).
Strategies such as guided autobiography, creative reminiscence, and life-writing with different literary forms allow us to expand our stories and examine them, to tell our lives and read them, more or less at once. As with any text, literary or lived, the activity is intrinsically ironic (Randall & McKim, 2008, p. 86), given the intricate “transaction” (Rosenblatt, 1978) between author, text, and reader, and the potential for multiple meanings that’s involved. Such strategies amplify awareness of the narrative complexity of our inner worlds and accelerate the ironizing trend by sensitizing us to a range of intertwining matters:
It sensitizes us to the arbitrariness of the memories we have retained of our past, to the puzzle of why we have held onto these (few) recollections and not the many others we might have formed instead, to the puzzle of what inner editor was at work at the time and guided by what bias.
It sensitizes us to the “interpretive parsimony” (Prado, 1986, p. 9) we have been practicing toward the memories we have held onto, whose meanings can be read from many different angles, never only one.
It sensitizes us to how different relationships, different “narrative environments” (Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 50–57), or different “discursive communities” (Hutcheon, 1994, pp. 89–115; familial, cultural, religious)—besides determining what passes for irony in the first place—(co)author our stories in different directions, elicit different emplotments of our life’s events, and evoke different voices to narrate them.
It sensitizes us to the gap between our memories and the experiences on which they are based, between the facts and the “factions” memory spins them into, to how, whenever we tell or write about our lives, memory and imagination invariably “supply and consume each other’s wares” (Bruner, 2002, p. 93).
It sensitizes us to how different metaphors can elicit different memories and, with them, different patterns of connection in the unending endeavor of making meaning in our lives, to the infinite metaphorical potential that memory thereby possesses (Randall, 2011).
It sensitizes us to the stories we can tell about our lives and those we cannot, that are too deep or dark for words and so are left untold; thus, it alerts us to our “unlived life” (Scott-Maxwell, 1968, p. 139), to the sides of our selves we haven’t yet unexplored, the might-have-beens and might-still-bes that lie within, the possibilities for being us.
It sensitizes us to the “untold and unwritten stories, cultural as well as personal, that are … constitutive of experience and identity,” to the narratives that “are with us in ways we don’t quite know,” that comprise our “narrative unconscious,” and that hold “the possibility of exploring new and different forms of making sense of personal life” (Freeman, 2010, p. 123).
It sensitizes us to the slippage between our thoughts or our feelings and the medium through which we express them; to how, with every story that we tell about our lives, our “self” as such slips silently away; to how we can never capture anything (an experience, a memory, a dream) cleanly or clearly in any form; to how there’s always something more that won’t go into words; to the gap between the said and the unsayable—the gap where irony “happens” (Hutcheon, 1994, pp. 89–115).
It sensitizes us to the “rhetoric of irony” (Booth, 1974) at work within our own lived stories, a sense intensified in proportion to our appreciation for the varieties of irony at work in literary stories too, let alone in autobiography.
It sensitizes us to how the past is never settled, since we view it, of necessity, through the lens of our agendas in the present in the light of our expectations for the future (Brockmeier, 2001); to how, since both present and future are forever changing, our past is changing too, its meaning continually “developing” (Charmé, 1984, p. 4).
It sensitizes us to how the act of looking back, through some form of “reading our lives” (Randall & McKim, 2008), while it assists with ego integration, effects a certain dis-integration as well, by awakening us to the several selves within our stories: self-now versus selves-then (Birkerts, 2007), self-as-narrator versus self-as-character (McAdams, 1996), remembered selves versus remembering selves (Neisser, 1994, p. 2)—and because of these “multiple storytelling selves” (McAdams, 2001, p. 671), to the possibility that self-deception is “the normal pathology of everyday life” (Crites, 1979, p. 125; Polonoff, 1987; Rorty, 1988). As autobiography scholar Paul John Eakin (1999) puts it, capturing nicely how awareness of this multiplicity—if not duplicity—can amplify our sense of irony: “There are many stories of Self to tell, and many selves to tell them” (p. xi).
The importance of being ironic: Reflections on aging and wisdom
I could continue adding to the ways in which our sense of irony is intensified through narrative reflection. However, gerontology is an earnest discipline, as befits the modernist ethos in which it is rooted. At some point, theories must make a concrete difference in older adults’ lives, not swirl around forever in the realm of the esoteric. They have to stand the “so what?” test. What, then, can cultivating a (positive) ironic stance accomplish? What tangible impact can it have on one’s resilience before the challenges of later life (Randall, 2013)? My short answer to such questions (a longer one requires a longer paper) is that it contributes to the development of wisdom in four key ways: by thickening, opening, lightening, and linking our stories. Before I look at each such way in turn, however, why speak of stories in connection with wisdom in the first place?
As a narrative gerontologist, I view wisdom in narrative terms more than cognitive-pragmatic ones, which is the primary angle from which gerontologists have been approaching it to date. For Paul Baltes and Jacqui Smith (1990), for instance, wisdom “is a highly developed body of factual and procedural knowledge and judgements” related to “the fundamental pragmatics of life” (p. 87; Baltes & Smith, 2008). Ever since Gary Kenyon and I began writing on the theme of “ordinary wisdom” (Randall & Kenyon, 2001, 2002), I have been concerned, however, that the angle of self-understanding tends to be ignored, despite age-old injunctions to know thyself. As soon as that angle is considered, we must take the narrative variable into account, for if narrative psychology tells us anything at all it is that self and story are intricately entwined (see McAdams et al., 2006). As Erikson (1963) foresaw when tying wisdom to the task of “life review,” to understand one’s self means understanding one’s self-story (see Butler, 2007). It means exploring the complex web of narratives through which one’s self has been experienced.
Thickening our stories
Even if the process of aging itself pushes us to be increasingly ironic, that push can be resisted. Many older adults can arrive in later life with an impoverished self, a thin inner story, a restricted range of themes, a narrow sense of narrative identity. To that extent, they are narratively foreclosed. They reach retirement, for instance, with little real sense of where to go from here, or of who they are, beyond what they used to be or or used to do. The task of turning inward and taking stock of their unique life-narrative can thus be somewhat daunting. When asked to tell about their lives, the result can be a too-neat, too-consistent, too-formulaic tale with little by way of “differentiation” (McAdams, 2001, p. 663); little apparent sense that things might have gone differently instead, that alternative interpretations of pivotal events always lie between the lines. “That’s my story,” such versions announce, “and I’m sticking to it.”
Processes such as dynamic reminiscence, guided autobiography, or life-story-writing through multiple genres can widen out our stories and take us deeper into our inner worlds. They can sensitize us to the unexplored complexity within: the various characters, subplots, and meanings that run through memory’s messy text, or lie beneath it in our narrative unconscious … or our dreams. And amid this complexity, we discern the unresolved themes, untold stories, and unlived lives we carry around inside us. We realize how intricate and intriguing we really are, how thick or “textured” are our narratives (Terrill & Gullifer, 2010), and the wealth of “narrative reserves” (Freeman, 2010, p. 123) on which we are able to draw. This realization, I am suggesting, is a key ingredient in the personal resilience with which to greet—and grow through—the challenges of later life, not be beaten down because of them nor driven to despair (Randall, 2013).
Opening our stories
The realization of how intricate we are from a narrative perspective is an antidote for the “narrative of decline” (Gullette, 2004) that our inner stories of our aging selves can frequently reflect. It is thus a remedy for narrative foreclosure, the conviction that though our life continues on, our story is all but over. By deliberately developing our ironic sensibility, permitting us to engage in textual play as regards our own life stories, the hold of the parsimonious narrative we may have been living by to date is progressively loosened. We get outside the story, and thus outside ourselves, in the process experiencing a measure of “re-biographing” (Rotenberg, 1987), “restorying” (Kenyon & Randall, 1997), “re-versioning” (Gearing, 1999, p. 51), or re-genre-ation. As gerontologist Harry Berman (1994) writes, reflecting on the role of keeping a journal in our development in later life, “our horizon of self-understanding shifts.” As it does, “it may become apparent that we were not in the middle of the story we thought we were in the middle of.” For instance,
perhaps we thought our life was a tragedy and all along, unbeknownst to us, it was a romance. Or perhaps we thought our life was almost over, at least in terms of the future holding anything new, and it turned out there was a lot more to it. (p. 180)
In such a case, we press past the perception of aging as unmitigated tragedy—as a cruel joke played on us by indifferent Fate—and catch a vision of “age as adventure” (Friedan, 1993, pp. 571–612).
By thus opening our stories up, the cultivation of an ironic stance positions us to appreciate “the mystery in my story,” as a student of mine expressed it once, and allows a glimpse of later life, for all its limitations, as fraught with possibility. Scott-Maxwell (1968) again: “I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say—‘of what?’ I can only answer, ‘We must each find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery’” (p. 142).
Lightening our stories
Another feature of an ironic stance is that we experience our lives within a grander narrative frame. As hinted already, we begin to experience our stories as humble sub-plots in the broader cosmic story. Such a story encompasses the generations that stretch behind us in the past (a sense acquired through genealogy, or researching our “roots”) and those that will follow us in the future, whose fortunes we hope, in some small way, to impact for the good—the sense of generativity (see McAdams, 2006). It enables us to “place [ourselves] in perspective among those generations now living, and to accept [our] place in an infinite historical progression” (Erikson et al., 1986, p. 56). In this way, an ironic stance releases us from the illusion of indispensability, of the all-importance of our personal concerns or contributions. “It’s only life,” irony lets us say. As such, it helps prepare us for the final stage, when we can let our stories go (Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 272–281).
Linking our stories
One of the members of de Medeiros’s memoir groups noted that the act of reading to the others a piece she had written about her past was as important in her healing as writing it in the first place, and that “the sharing” which ensued was key (Cole & de Medeiros, 2001). When we share our stories deeply, the process opens us not only to the complexity of our own internal worlds, but to that of other’s worlds too, and so facilitates a quality of connection that is uniquely possible perhaps in later life alone: a soul connection, made all the richer for the thickness of our respective narratives. Once more, Ruth Ray (2000): “‘[W]ise’ people watch themselves tell life stories, learn from others’ stories, and intervene in their own narrative processes to allow for change by admitting new stories and interpretations into their repertoire” (p. 29).
Elsewhere (Randall & Kenyon, 2001, 2002, 2004), I have called such story-to-story connections “wisdom environments.” Though hardly a new idea, wisdom environments are any sort of narrative environments in which we can expand upon our personal stories and have them listened to respectfully by others, environments in which we learn from others’ strategies for storying their lives and evolve thicker, more substantive versions of our own. We can develop “multiple fluid narratives” (Bateson, 2007) to keep on growing through the challenges of our latter years, accepting the ambiguity, celebrating the uncertainty, and living the questions.
Postscript on positive aging
Cultivating irony in later life carries risks, for irony can go either way. Fine though the line may be between the two, positive irony is the way of openness, playfulness, and wonder; negative irony, that of cynicism and despair. What is more, a positive ironic stance is no once-for-all achievement. We have to keep working at it, ideally with support from others. We will have good days and bad days, glass-half-full days and glass-half-empty ones, when the losses in our lives will outweigh the gains. This stands to reason, for age is a balancing act. It keeps us on the edge, poised between “the inalterability of the past and the unknowability of the future” (Erikson et al., 1986, p. 56), caught in “the tension between a sense of enduring comprehensiveness and an opposing sense of despair, of dread and hopelessness” (p. 54). The deliberate nurturing of a sense of (positive) irony through narrative reflection can tip the scales, however, by pointing us beyond a story of aging as inevitable decline toward that of “positive development in later life” (Labouvie-Vief, 2000), or simply “positive aging” (M. Gergen & Gergen, 2003).
Psychologist Gisela Labouvie-Vief (2000) distinguishes between two broad types of positive development: the high road and the low road, if you will. In the former, “the goal … is to achieve maximum complexity by opening ourselves to all forms of human experience, whether positive or negative, whether in self or others” (p. 376), and “the integration of the rational with the nonrational and emotional to yield more integrative and complex structures” (p. 366). In the latter, the low road, “optimal aging is … defined … by inner processes that maximize individual well-being … at the expense of increasingly gating out experiences and individuals that disturb one’s equilibrium” (p. 376). I see the intentional cultivation of a (positive) ironic stance as fostering positive development of the high road variety, and as critical to growing old and not just—passively, resignedly—getting old.
Irony, of course, is but one piece only of the positive aging puzzle, and to many, it might seem somewhat odd. Adequate finances, sufficient social support, reasonable health are among the more expected ones. Still, the irony piece is rich in its own right; rich in potential for insight into the narrative complexity of late life development, notwithstanding the many questions that it raises. To cite but a few, there is the question of irony’s role in a “good” life story (McAdams, 2001), in connection with such criteria as “openness” and “coherence” (see Hyvärinen, Hydén, Saarenheimo, & Tamboukou, 2010; Linde, 1993). And there is the question of the relationship between irony and resilience, irony and humor, irony and gender (see, e.g., Terrill & Gullifer, 2010); or between irony and the “late style” of aging artists and writers (Said, 2006). There is the question, as well, of defining irony in the first place, not to mention of distinguishing more clearly between positive irony and negative irony and the role that both may play in wisdom. My main aim here, however, has merely been to introduce the idea, not to spell out its every implication. I defer to colleagues far more qualified than I to pursue it in greater detail.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant fron any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Author biography
). He has played a key role in establishing the field of “narrative gerontology” and has published over 40 articles or chapters on the narrative complexity of later life. His books include The Stories We Are (University of Toronto, 1995) and, with Elizabeth McKim, Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old (Oxford University Press, 2008). Address: Department of Gerontology, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5G3, Canada. Email: