We're all fairly familiar with proleptic irony: the irony of anticipation in which we know something that a character in a narrative doesn't know yet. Now meet its weird sister, born today: apoleptic irony. (Thanks office hours with a super smart undergrad!) I love it when a new term is born, this time with the help of my handy Woodhouse's English–Greek dictionary.
Apoleptic irony is the retroactive irony we feel when a narrative's ending causes us to look back differently at the narrative. The gap between what we thought we were reading and what we are now reading is exploited. (To my undergrads I describe irony as gapsploitation, that is, the aesthetic exploitation of a gap between 1+n levels of signification. Which is more of a mouthful than “gapsploitation.”)
Apoleptic irony would then seem to be a subroutine within Romantic irony, in which the we realize that the narrator is the protagonist. Wordsworth's There Was a Boy and “The Two April Mornings,” for instance, are drenched with it. In both cases, the death of the supposed protagaonist, reported at the end of the poem, causes us to look back at what we've read with fresh eyes. “Whoah. So the whole time there wasn't a boy, it was just the narrator standing by his grave, mute.” “Whoah. Matthew is dead and the poem is actually about the narrator's relationship with him, not simply Matthew's relationship with his dead girl.”
By the way, I can't get enough of this effect. “Whoah, you mean Deckard was actually a replicant.” I rest my case your honor. It's noir irony par excellence and by extension, it's dark-ecological.
Apoleptic irony is thus also responsible for the thrill of retroactive causation, which is one thing that Hegel and object-oriented ontology share, along perhaps with deconstruction. (Note for instance Graham Harman's approving conversation with Žižek on backwards causality in Tool-Being.)
Since for OOO aesthetics is first philosophy and may be the basis for causation itself, and since the aesthetic dimension is also profoundly significant for Hegel and for deconstruction, I think apoleptic irony must play some fundamental role in causality. I shall have to investigate it some more in my book on causation, Realist Magic.
In particular it's interesting how irony causes entities to be joined as well as separated...they must join for causation to happen, yet nothing could happen at all if everything just swam around in glue.
at the end, where you learn that the whole thing was an elaborate ruse.
That's an example I hadn't thought of .
Stuff I'm thinking about too (wrt occasionalism as well). And: The Maltese Falcon (it turns out Spade's known the killer from the start). And The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Deckard's not an android in the book.
How much does this differ from Aristotelian recognition? (I agree it does.)
John Crowley's great AEgypt too.
Thanks William—tell me more about what you're thinking wrt occasionalism here. I shall have to think about how this differs from anagnorisis, that's an interesting question. At first glance the clue is in the “ana” prefix, which suggests knowing again, “re” cognition. Apolepsis introduces some kind of novelty. Maybe.
...in haste, from my phone: Book 3 of The Faerie Queene. Britomart refuses to go after the fleeing Florimel who is urgently rushing toward some unknown goal. A few days later, the wounded Britomart is brooding by the sea, when she's attacked by Marinell. She wounds him grievously, and (like Adonis) he hovers between life and death. Cut to Florimel: it transpires she's running to give succor to her love, the wounded Marinell. But she's been on her way to help him before Britomart wounded him. Thus the sequence is: she runs, Britomart doesn't follow but meets and wounds Marinell instead, Marinell's wound then becomes the cause of her running.
The summoning of the patronus, in Harry Potter 3, where he knows that he can summon his patronus and it/he will come only because he's seen it from the other side before;
appointment at Samara, where running away from Death to Samara inadvertently and ironically fulfils the appointment with Death at Samara (fi http://www.buddytv.com/articles/supernatural/supernatural-what-does-appo... );
and Eliot's Little Gidding, all of it, and perhaps especially the lines
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(So we understand how we came to start our exploration only after its completion returns us to its start.)