|
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
Per G.G., SHEF OF ORDNANCE
We are not accustomed to such threats from authors, and our first reaction might be shock – after that, perhaps confusion. Why should Mark Twain make threats that are obviously exaggerated and impossible to carry out? Why, indeed, except to attract our attention to the novel’s motive, moral and plot. We may be amused by the author’s obvious antipathy to literary critics and literary criticism, but we may also feel slightly goaded, a bit more eager to look for a motive, moral and plot anywhere we damned well please! And after a moment we may recognize that Mark Twain’s purpose in including this notice must have been to obtain such a reaction; he forbids us to examine his book’s literary meaning in order suggest ironically that it does have serious literary purposes. Thus, although Huck’s tone has accurately reflected his attitude toward the reader, it is doubtful that the same is true of Mark Twain’s “Notice”. His tone is ironic and he means just the opposite of what he says.
As these examples indicate, an author’s tone is linked closely to intention and meaning; the tone must be inferred from a close and careful study of the various elements within the work, including plot, character, setting, point of view and style.
No matter how hard an author tries to mask his attitudes and feelings, and to hide his presence within the work, perhaps by taking refuge somewhere behind the narrative voice that tells the story, the author’s tone can be inferred by the choices he makes in the process of ordering and presenting his material: by what is included and emphasized and what, by contrast, is omitted. In such choices lie what Wayne Booth refers to as “the implicit evaluation which the author manages to convey behind his explicit presentation.” The literary critic learns to look at such choices carefully – at the characters, incidents, settings, and details depicted: at the issues and problems that are raised and explored; at the style the author has employed; at every decision, in short, that the author has made – in order to infer from them the underlying attitudes and tone that color and control the work as a whole. The task is not at all an easy one, and for this reason tone is perhaps the most difficult and elusive of all the literary elements we have thus far discussed.
IRONY. When Huckleberry Finn steps forward to introduce himself, he is both frank and open, and there is little reason to believe that he means anything other than what he says. The same thing, however, is not always true of Mark Twain himself, who is far more circumspect and cautious and prefers to adopt a posture of detachment and objectivity. Authors like Mark Twain recognize that life is not always simple or straightforward; that the affairs of men are full of surprises, ambiguities, contradictions, and complexities; and that appearances can and often do deceive. In order to reflect the puzzling, problematic nature of experience, such authors choose to approach their subjects indirectly, through the use of irony. They use techniques to create within a work two separate and contrasting levels of experience and a “disparity of understanding” between them.
The three types of irony that occur most frequently in literature are verbal irony (in which there is a contrast between what a speaker literally says and what he or she means); irony of situation (in which an event or situation turns out to be the reverse of what is expected or appropriate); and dramatic irony (in which the state of affairs known to the reader or audience is the reverse of what its participants suppose it to be).
Verbal irony is easily enough recognized in speech because of the intonation of the speaker’s voice. For example, when Mark Anthony refers to Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as “an honorable man”, few members of the audience are likely to misunderstand the irony in his statement. When used in fiction, however, verbal irony is sometimes more difficult to identify because it is conveyed exclusively through the author’s style, through the words on the printed page. Sometimes the author helps the reader by means of repetition, as Hawthorne does in My Kinsman, Major Molineux, where robin, the uninitiated youth from the country, prides himself on his native “shrewdness”. Shrewd, at least in the ways of the city, Robin is most certainly not.
Irony of situation, on the other hand, results from the careful manipulation of plot, point of view, setting and atmosphere. Robin’s prolonged and frustrating search for his kinsman, for example, is rendered ironic by the fact that object is the very individual who Robin believes will help him to rise in the world. Robin Molineux is but one in a long line of fictional characters whose expectations are altered or reversed by the events that overtake him. The situational irony in Hawthorne’s story is sustained not only by the plot, but by the point of view, which reveals the true state of things only gradually both to Robin and the reader.
Dramatic irony, like irony of situation, depends on the use of plot, character, and point of view. An omniscient narrator, for example, will sometimes reveal information to the reader that his character does not yet know; this allows the narrator (and the reader) to judge the subsequent actions of those characters and anticipate the likely outcome of events. Dramatic irony can also be established by means of characters whose innocence and naivety cause them to misperceive events whose significance is perfectly clear to the reader. The plots of such works frequently turn on the matter of knowing or not knowing, as in Henry James’ The Tree of Knowledge, and result in outcomes that are either comic or tragic in their final implication. As critics Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg note, there are “In any example of narrative art … broadly speaking, three points of view – those of the characters, the narrator and the audience.” When any of the three “perceives more – or less – than another, irony must be either actually or potentially present.” In any work of fiction, it is crucially important that we are able to determine if and how that potential ahs been exploited; to overlook or to misinterpret the presence of irony can only lead to a misinterpretation of the author’s attitudes and tone and the way he would have us approach and judge the work.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
