CONCLUSION

Reading literature ironically requires that we think beyond the traditional philosophical commitment to propositional, translatable and non-contradictory thinking, recognising that truth is not simply there to be referred to by an innocent language. Truth requires thinking through the contradictory force of language, its essential difference from both what is and what remains beyond question. To read literature ironically also requires, however, the continued force of philosophy’s truth and non-contradiction. We can only read texts ironically, seeing the tensions and relations between what is said and not-said, what is and is not the case, if we commit ourselves to a sense and truth towards which speech and language strive. There cannot, then, be a simple abandoning of the structures of truth and reason or the difference of irony in favour of a postmodern world of textuality, where signs coexist without conflict, hierarchy or tension.

Irony can, then, neither be achieved nor overcome. One cannot remain in a naively postmodern position above and beyond any discourse. The liberal ironist who has freed himself from metaphysical commitment, who speaks with an enlightened sense of his difference and distance from what he says, remains blind to the ways in which this discourse of detachment has its own attachments. Rorty’s disengaged and sceptical pragmatist is, like Carter’s presented male gaze, always defined against the determination, fixity, identity and opacity of desires and bodies. At the same time, one cannot be simply at one with, or immanent to, a pure field of material difference. One cannot be postcolonial or postmodern, liberated from any position of decision or judgement. To be embodied is not an event of pure surface or becoming; one becomes in a certain style or manner. There is always a certain irony, always a predicament of disjunction between what one is and what one means, both for oneself and for others.

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