Shaken Wisdom: Irony and Meaning in Postcolonial African Fiction

Notes

note s introduction 1. A trend in the field of archaeology started in the 1960s, moving away from emphasis on cultural history and diffusionism toward a claim to more rigorous scientific method. See Trigger 1989. 2. Gates rarely uses the term irony in what was no doubt intended to be a work of cultural differentiation. But in that he defines black tradition as “double -voiced,” he evokes a terrain closely tied to verbal irony as a discourse of double meaning. He recognizes this relatedness when he describes a sixteenthcentury black poet (Latino) “signifying” about King Philip of Spain: “This subtle and witty use of irony is among the most common forms of Signifyin(g)” (90). 3. John Lyons (26) translates énonciation as “utterance-act,” which Benveniste defines as “the actualization of language by an individual act of use.” The term utterance agent will be used in the sense of énonciateur, the person or viewpoint to whom the speaker’s beliefs are imputed: this person or viewpoint could represent the speaker himself or herself, whether a character or a narrator, but it could also represent an implied author or someone else whose thinking it is alluding to, with an opinion at variance with that of the person actually pronouncing the words. That is why two (or more) utterance-agents can appear in the words of the same speaker. 4. “Dominée par la clarté d’un journal rédigé au quotidien [par Denis], l’écriture semble […] viser par cette recherche d’une plus grande clarté à situer le personnage du prédicateur lui-même dans une plus grande lumière.” 5. See Tobner 17. Notes to Introduction and Chapter One 152 6. According to the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, “[i]n irony proper, the speaker is conscious of double meaning and the victim unconscious; in sarcasm both parties understand the double meaning” (634). This does not preclude the possibility that the victim may only become aware of the double meaning later on, so that the subtlety of irony eventually turns into the humiliating bite of sarcasm. 7. “peignent indifféremment des dictateurs sanguinaires qui, aux lendemains des indépendances des États africains, ont accaparé le pouvoir, transform é leur pays en goulags et leurs concitoyens en bagnards sans recours.” 8. “Il n’y a dès lors plus de doute que l’exclusion et la marginalisation dont sont frappés leurs ‘héros’ au niveau paratextuel et énonciatif, participent d’une stratégie délibérée et consciente des deux écrivains.” 9. “‘L’indépendance’ du chef par rapport aux auxiliaires du pouvoir que sont la police, la ‘coopération technique’ et les partis politiques (pouvoir et opposition ) induit une déliquescence du pouvoir lui-même et des centres éclatés de décision qui se trouvent dès lors divisés en groupuscules indépendants d’un pouvoir central inexistant.” 10. In L’Implicite, Kerbrat-Orecchioni distinguishes between context as the totality of referential factors rendering a given utterance intelligible and co-text as the words and sentences surrounding the utterance in a text (see 300). 11. It is also interesting to note that Kourouma’s first novel, Les soleils des indépendances, is punctuated by a proverb at the beginning of each chapter. 12. As V. Y. Mudimbe (76) points out, even when some anthropologists evoked the “possibility of interpretation [of African societies] from a new perspective ” based on more immediate experience of those societies, “the methodological rules remained essentially the same. They [ . . . ] still imply that Africans must evolve from their frozen state to the dynamism of Western civilization.” 1. from rhetoric to semantics 1. “L’école où je pousse nos enfants tuera en eux ce qu’aujourd’hui nous aimons et conservons avec soin, à juste titre. Peut-être notre souvenir lui-même mourra-t-il en eux” (63–64). 2. “Le projet littéraire de Chinua Achebe s’inscrit dans la littérature en anglais comme un anti-roman sur l’Afrique: il veut démontrer que Joseph Conrad dans Au coeur des ténèbres (1902) et Joyce Cary dans Mister Johnson (1939) n’épuisent pas la matière romanesque africaine.” 3. See Garnier (104–5) for a discussion of the relationship between irony and humor in Kourouma’s fiction. 4. “seuleànotreavispeutvalablementêtreportéeaucomptedutransportesthétiquel ’ironiepardramatisationencequ’elleestbienlerefletdelavivacitédelaparole Notes to Chapter One 153 africaine et constitue en même...