LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

irony and the poetics of palestinian exileAs Hutcheon notes, there is ‘little disagreement among critics that theinterpretation of irony does involve going beyond the text itself … to decodingthe ironic intent of the coding agent’ (1985: 52–3). Beyond that, criticalperspectives diverge. Studies of irony tend to fall into broad categories, such asthe philosophical/existential (Kierkegaard), the taxonomic (Muecke), therhetorical (Booth), the pragmatic (Hutcheon, Sperber and Wilson), the stylistic(S’hiri), the phenomenological (Wilde), and the perspective that sees irony as aprinciple of structure in literature (Frye, Brooks). These differ widely in approachas well as in the understanding of irony, and (Wilde excepted) tend to disengageirony from specific historical contexts, though several have commented on thegeneral irony of existence. Frye, for example, notes that the ‘archetype of theinevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of Death’ (1957: 42);similarly Booth, ‘If the universe is ultimately an absurd multiuniverse, then allpropositions about or portraits of any part of it are absurd …’ (1974: 267); andMuecke, ‘We do not need to imagine either a malignant or an indifferent deityin order to see the world as in an ironic predicament …’ (1969: 150). Mueckeaptly distinguishes between verbal irony and what he calls ‘situational irony’ inthe one book (1970: 28) and the ‘irony of events’ in the other (1969: 102). ‘It isironic’, he notes, ‘when we meet what we set out to avoid, especially when themeans we take to avoid something turn out to be the very means of bringingabout what we sought to avoid’ (1969: 28). Certainly the Palestinian people didnot choose to be exiled. The loss of the land and subsequent dispersal cameabout in spite of all Palestinian efforts to avoid them. The harder the Palestinianpeople have worked to get back to their homeland, the farther away it seemsto get. With Palestine seen as the desired centre of resolution for conflicts inEurope that had nothing to do with the Palestinian people, and world powerslike the British Empire and the United States ranged against them, it is notdifficult to see why Palestinian writers might see, not the universe but historyitself as absurd. As Said notes, ‘What to many Palestinians is either an incomprehensiblecruelty of fate or a measure of how appalling are the prospects forsettling their claim can be clarified by seeing irony as a constitutive factor intheir lives’ (1991: 5).I have already touched on the subject of irony in Palestinian literature in myintroduction to Memory for Forgetfulness (pp. xii–xiii). This is a more extensivetreatment of the subject, and its purpose is to focus on irony as a practice thatunites literary form with historical experience – in this case the exilic presenceabsenceexperience of the Palestinian people. This approach highlights theimportance of specific contexts to the study of irony because to a large extentthe absent meaning depends on, and arises from, them. Following Hutcheon(pp. 52–3) and others, I also insist on the pragmatic dimension of irony. Thefirst official designation of Palestinians as ‘present-absent’ was used by the— 33 —www.taq.ir