Allegory and Violence by Gordon Tesky (review)

144 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 the other remain active. 'The semantic "solution" of irony would hold in suspension the said plus something other than and in addition to it that remained unsaid.' Likewise, the chapter on irony's frames contends that its interpretive context needs to be understood broadly as including circumstantiaL textual, and intertextual dimensions. While Hutcheon deals instructively with both sides of the ironic interchange , she focuses more upon the crucial r-ole played by the interpreter of irony and - given the range of possible interpreters - the degree of indeterminacy that opens up. An interpreter's 'attribution' of irony depends in turn upon the configuration of discursive communities within which (or between which) the irony occurs. lIt is less that irony creates communities, then, than [that] discursive communities makeirony possible in the first place.' Since such communities are multiple, irony always needs to be seen against the backdrop of possible misunderstanding; its edge results from the fact that it remains open to possible misconstrual. This makes it clear why the politics of irony remain risky, for its use involves a loss of interpretive controL Irony implies a need for evaluation that the ironic utterance or text does not quite deliver. 'Irony is thus an overt case of what has been argued as basic to all discourse, for it foregrounds the "evaluative accent" that context gives to any utterance.' That irony is at once meta-evaluative in this way and therefore reflectively distanced, and yet tremendously charged with affect - because it opens the question of who has the right to judge - is Hutcheon's greatest insight ... and yet the point where much remains unsaid. Again, though, Hutcheon would remind us of the risks of generalizing further and of the fact that irony remains a preliminary and provisional rhetorical gesture. As she repeatedlyinsists, irony is trans-ideological; ithas no necessary or consistent affiliation with any ideological stance, even though it plays with the power imbalances that shadow all acts of human conununication. Irony's edge - and its limit - lie in its self-reflexivity, as Hutcheon's final chapter makes clear. Acknowledging one's own limits as interpreter, as the organizers of 'Into the Heart of Africa' may have done, is not the same as addressing them by choosing to expand them in particular directions. (GARY HANDWERK) Gordon Tesky. Allegory and Violence Cornell University Press. xiv, 196. us $35.00 Tesky's speculative meditation on the cultural etiology of 'allegory' is at once intricate and venturesome and wisely treats its subject more as loose canon than tame ploughshare. Drifting in identity crisis from trope to HUMANITIES 145 genre, allegory destabilizes entrenched distinctions between offices of ornament and invention, analogy and narrative. It travels with a class of rhetorical operators, like 'tragedy,' 'irony,' 'pastoral,' or even 'narrative' itself, that seem to require exquisite tact in their critical deployment; they breed a conspiracy among the laicy not to demand of each other (or themselves) too rigorous definition lest all conversation fall mute from embarrassed resources. Allegory and Violence occasionally flirts with tactless rigidities: 'the microcosm-macrocosm analogy is the master metaphor of allegory'; '[t]he entire structure of the fifth canto of the Inferno is designed to expose allegory's primary work, which is to force mearung on beings who are reduced for that purpose to substance'; '[b]y the twentieth century the deepest motives of allegorical expression - to transform time into consciousness and space into body - had been taken up into literary theory.' Tesky's designs on this conversation, however, are clearly not its muting, but its mutation: 'to open up the field of allegory studies by asking questions about what lies beneath the phenomenon under analysis' and in the process to defend a subsumed thesis which adds literary history and theory of the symbol to critical theory as 'cultural practices' that have 'succeeded to allegory.' This interrogation of allegory negotiates the more dangerous shoals oftact carefully: '[m]y aim is not so much to answer these questions as to try to understand what they mean - to ask them at length.' It is, of course, a 'stretch,' a 'conceit,' to assert not only analogy but succession between allegory and critical theory. Such...