Isn't it ironic.

In Frye's second lecture of the "The Educated Imagination." He makes some very striking remarks. One comment that caught my eye was "The tone literature takes toward this world is not a moralizing tone, but the tone we call ironic. The effect of irony is to enable us to see over the head of a situation- we have irony in a play, for example, when we know more about what’s going on than the characters do- and so to detach us, at least in imagination, from the world we’d prefer not to be involved with." (pg.31) I thought this was intriguing because he states that literature does not reflect the positive outlook on the world. He states that literature uses sarcasm, to perhaps convey a lighter mood. He proclaims that in order to see through a situation you need to sometimes look on the lighter side of things. What I don’t understand is why he says “to detach us, at least in imagination, from the world we’d prefer not to be involved with.” Does he mean that through the ironic tone in literature, we use our imagination to create a world where there is no wrong?