Shaken Wisdom: Irony and Meaning in Postcolonial African Fiction

Conclusion: When the Handshake Has Become Another Thing

143 conclusion When the Handshake Has Become Another Thing I have emphasized linguistic and pragmatic approaches to irony, not because I expected to invent a new method of analysis, but because I was and still am convinced that in addition to being an artistic medium , African literary discourse is a particular form of pragmatic communication intimately connected with cultural and historical problems of identity, oppression, and voice. It is important to confront some of the major issues of irony, according to recent theoretical models, with issues of representation and narrative voice raised by such authors as Achebe, Kourouma, and Beyala. The preceding analyses have also shown that the problem of irony in African literature and cultural traditions is too complex, controversial, and multifaceted to be discussed within the limits of one or two models , schools of thought, or even disciplines. Irony is a problem of language , but it is also one of behaviors, intentionality, interpersonal relationships , community, and history. Irony is not only a problem for the (ex-)colonizer and the (ex-)colonized but a problem for the old and the young, and for men and women: a barrier, an arm, a refuge, a lesson, a dry smile of ambivalent complicity. The limits of various approaches to irony become apparent in the light of both critical literature and the needs arising from their application to African culture. Wayne Booth’s discussion of the difference between stable and unstable irony is significant because under the growing influence of reader-response theory in the latter part of the Shaken Wisdom 144 twentieth century, he was concerned with the dynamic interaction between two poles of communicative process or event: the implied author and the reader. Booth’s notion of “stable irony” reflects the need to establish structural limits to the plausible meanings of a text. Such boundaries would reveal themselves to be more and more difficult to maintain in the face of the growing power and complexity of theories and narratives of difference—not the least of which has been that of Africanity , caught in the double bind of self-affirmation and the admission of its own hybridity. In general, theories of irony such as that of Kaufer, based on semantic hierarchies, with an initial, apparent interpretation to be rejected in favor of a second, intended meaning, run into difficulty on several fronts. Because of their emphasis on lexical interpretation, they rely heavily on textual and/or co-textual signals and thereby offer little help in knowing how to account for situational context and oral or gestural conditions of communication in the relationship between speaker and audience. Kohvakka’s schema of concentric contextual levels of contradiction goes a long way toward clarifying the locus of the contradiction that signals the presence of irony, but as Berrendonner has argued, contradiction alone is not necessarily a sign of irony, so that a further step is still needed to reach a convincing means of predicting ironic understanding or intent. Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s approach attempts to situate irony at the level of connotative semes, where the figurative meaning of an ironic utterance—what the ironist is really getting at—becomes the denotative meaning and the ironic form becomes the utterance’s connotation . Although this allows us to discern micro-semantic contradictions in textual environments more effectively, the flaunt/flout problem in Anthills of the Savannah being a prime example, her decision to view irony as a trope or “figure of meaning” rather than a “figure of thought” ensures, according to Perrin, continued dependence on antiphrasis and consequently failure to recognize the crucial role played by the speaker ’s attitude toward what he or she is saying. Both Perrin and Berrendonner argue against the primary role of antiphrasis in the production of irony and propose pragmatics-based explanations in which the role of antiphrasis becomes secondary, functioning as a source of semantic specification at best. For the latter, irony consists primarily of an argumentative ambiguity. To qualify as ironic, an utterance must present an argumentative value. Once that value is established, the ironist uses the effect of mention to discredit the point of view he or she is apparently advocating. This is made possible by the Conclusion 145 “multiple coded nature of communication,” which is to say that just as more than one code can be employed in a given act of communication, more than one viewpoint can be represented and more than one audience can...