Grandchild of Empire—About Irony, Mainly in the Commonwealth

Tom Venetis is a professional journalist and editor in Toronto.

Irony is a subject that can overwhelm even the most intrepid of writers
and thinkers. Where should one begin to speak about irony: with the
ancients, say Sophocles or Virgil; or more “recently” with Nietzsche
and Tolstoy; or better yet, with such modern masters as Beckett and
Derrida? And how should one approach the subject of irony in literature,
particularly what is often called postcolonial literature and empire?
Each perspective brings a host of problems.

Knowing the pitfalls, William New approaches the subject in a way that
allows him to get around some if not all of them. Instead of writing
about irony and empire directly, he deploys an autobiographical method
where he explores irony through his own experience and how authors as
different as Derek Walcott, Patrick White, Chinua Achebe, and Salman
Rushdie have used irony as a way to disrupt and challenge power in its
various guises.

New is right to emphasize that irony, with its indirectness and
sometimes maddening way of never saying directly what it wants, is often
the most direct and most challenging form of critique available to those
living and working in colonial environments. Irony challenges the status
quo; its indirectness is the most corrosive way to undermine seemingly
fixed and often dangerous ways of thinking and seeing, the way a slow
drip over time can cut through what looks like an unbreakable stone. New
is right to show how the now-neglected Australian novelist Patrick White
was a master of using ironic indirectness to undermine his characters’
sense of certainty about things, classes, and peoples.

What is also refreshing about New’s approach in this 2002 Garnett
Sedgewick Memorial Lecture is that he shows in detail how the various
ironic strategies used by different writers allow the individual
critiques of ideology and empire to resonate beyond the immediate
political and social circumstances, making the works understandable for
readers who may not in any way be familiar with the social and political
circumstances from which the works emerged.

While all too short, New’s lecture should provide an excellent
starting point for more fruitful discussions in the future.