IRONY, PARADOX, AND PROPOSALS
John A. Oyuela
All of us, in any time of our lives, have experienced sensations produced by contradictory and -in some cases- improbable situations. Recently, I have felt those sensations because of the current state of Colombian Literature's; and I want to summarize that situation in just two terms: Irony and Paradox. As an example of what I mean by irony, I will mention an Irish man named Jonathan Swift. After that, I will mention an English man named Terry Eagleton who defines paradox; finally, I will propose an idea that is both ironic and paradoxical.
SWIFT AND IRONY
Jonathan Swift wrote about the incoherence of the epoch he lived in. One of his most important, ironic, and well known writings is A modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public. Here, Swift wanted to denounce the poverty and starvation of the Irish lower-class people, but beyond that he also wanted to question the indifference of the Irish higher classes. The belief in Swift's days was that the poor people got what they deserved and could elevate themselves to a better position if they wanted to, a view that later evolved into "social Darwinism." Swift used irony when he proposes that Irish mothers had babies and sell them to their English lords as delicacies. This is Swift's ironic sense.
THE ENGLISH LITERATURE PARADOX
The book Literary Theory: An introduction (1983) by Terry Eagleton, gives in the two first chapters a summary about how English literature became recognized and important around the world. There, Eagleton appoints to George Gordon (a nineteenth century English literature professor in Oxford) who said,: "England is sick, and…the English literature must save it. As (according to what I understand) the churches have failed and the social remedies are slow, the English literature has now a triple function: it must still, I suppose, delight us and instruct us, but also, over everything, save our cores and healing to the State" Those words had a dramatic effect on the whole Victorian England. As a result, the subject English Literature got institutionalized as a necessary subject to approve school and technical studies.
Paradoxically, English Literature became a National Issue and its recognized as one of the best ones world-wide. Of course, nobody would have thought that Literature was able to save England when the problems did not refer to it … anyhow, it was able to.
MY PROPOSALS
First of all, I must recognize that what I propose is in a certain way ironic and paradoxical because it is exactly the opposite of what I have been trying to illustrate with Swift and Eagleton's examples. It is sad that, we as students of Human Sciences, we do not have -at least in principle- to attend Colombian Literature classes. As I understand, the only one program that offers and demand the attendance to Colombian Literature classes is the Literature Program. Knowing that situation, I allowed myself to think on the subject and to propose a new subject for all the careers at the National University, it would be named Colombian Literary Studies. Such subject could allow students to understand the current national problems and, what is the best, to propose solutions throughout a noble way: Literature.
The irony and paradox of all this is that I had to use external patterns to propose a way for understanding our own concerns: Colombian Literature. I wonder, why do we have to read European or American authors and customs since
we have our own authors and customs? I am not proclaiming a pseudonationalism, but a possibility of constructing a massive identity: the Colombian one.
Finally, as Héctor Abad -a Colombian writer says in one of his columns in a famous magazine: "When our time comes, we will had left many unread books, but life is also leaving a great amount of open possibilities." So, let's work it out before our time comes.
Eagleton, T. Literary Theory: An introduction. P.36 (1983) Spanish edition (1994)
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