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Irony
T. Howe
While irony comes in many different flavors—verbal, cosmic, situational, dramatic, and so on—it essentially describes an incongruity or inconsistency between distinct levels of a text: the expected and the actual, the intended and the stated, the reader's knowledge and the character's, one character's knowledge and another's (Abrams 165-166). When we talk about irony, we are interested in questions of intention, expectation, and context—not only those that govern the conventional production of the text, but also those that govern how we as readers approach it. For instance, the opening line in Eliot's The Wasteland—“April is the cruellest month”—is only ironic in certain contexts; for most of the western world, it is ironic because April isn't a particularly “cruel” month. However, it would not be ironic for someone reading the poem on the Indian subcontinent, because April is part of the rainy season. Understanding irony is useful because it helps us understand that meaning is not a static thing that simply exists; it cannot always be controlled. In fact, the reader has an essential role to play in the apprehension or construction of meaning. Understanding irony requires that we look beyond the surface of things and consider how multiple—and often competing—meanings can emerge simultaneously.
In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, irony is an integral structural component of the text, and it colors the meanings that emerge throughout. Because we learn that the events Marlow recounts while waiting on the Thames with the unnamed frame narrator have already happened, we know that his perspective has necessarily changed—he recounts his story from an ironic position, one that has changed because of having experienced “the horror!” (148). Unlike the other men on the boat, Marlow knows what's going to happen, what has happened. How we understand the nature of “the horror!” he encounters will dictate how we understand Marlow's descriptions of, for instance, the “noble cause” (74) of colonialization. So, we have at least two levels of irony here; the structural irony, and the irony that Marlow's experiences inject into the story he tells, the traces of we see in the language itself. If we don't see the irony that Marlow employs—that is, if we think that colonialization really is as “noble” an “idea” (72) as Marlow says it is, then we have missed an important, even crucial element of the text. However, we may indeed miss it, especially if this is our first time reading the book, or if we're not paying attention to the other elements in the text that might help us discover it. Like our experience of irony, Marlow “did not see the real significance of that wreck at once. I fancy I see it now, but I am not sure—not at all” (89). Marlow's experiences in the Congo have changed him in profound but sometimes indefinite ways, and that is what we have to struggle with in the text.
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