Ironie paradoxale et ironie poétique by Monique Yaari

Abstract

B o o k R ev iew s Lang’s own playfulness and perceptiveness are more pleasurably evident in her fine, closely critical reading of Barthes’ Roland Barthes, or in her careful discussions of the shift­ ing aims in Stendhal’s and Proust’s earlier and later prose. Lang also shows herself to be a gifted analyst of style, as in her analysis of Proust’s metaphors. Yet her text would claim more than this for “ hum or,” marking its own historical and ultimately political aspirations for the concept. The theme of a politics of humor, however, really surfaces only as a vanishing point towards which the final pages uneasily gesture. If indeed, “ what most sharply distinguishes humor from irony is that the former operates in the world” (196), one would like to know more about the exact nature of that worldliness. For humor to take on a role that embraces more than a vague intellectual openness, as Lang herself reminds us, much work remains to be done. G a r y H a n d w e r k University o f Washington Monique Yaari. Ir o n ie p a r a d o x a l e e t ir o n ie p o é t iq u e . Birmingham: Summa Publica­ tions, 1988. Pp. 277. A revision of the author’s 1982 Ph.D . dissertation, Ironie paradoxale et ironie poétique contains two inadequately related halves—an essay on theories of irony (pp. 3-131) fol­ lowed by a study of Gide’s Paludes (pp. 135-247). Yaari has certainly done a lot of reading of contemporary theory, yet it is not clear that her study of Paludes is either contingent on or stems from the rather labored discussion of irony in the first part of her book. The exten­ sive bibliography cited has not, it seems, always been fully digested and this shows up in the frequently blurred discussion. Both parts of the book suffer from inadequate editing. The manuscript would have gained a lot from much stricter selection and organization of material. Often, for example, minor points and superfluous examples tend to obscure the central arguments, whose impact would have been quite different, given a tighter, more concise style. The main problem with Part I, on theories of irony (whose discussion is heavily depen­ dent on the work of Northrop Frye, Wayne Booth, D. C. Muecke and others), is the lack of concrete examples. In view of the immense bibliography on this topic, it was somewhat unwise to attempt a general study o f irony without recourse to an extensive corpus of literary examples. Furthermore, it is not self-evident that the categories of “ ironie para­ doxale” and “ ironie poétique” are either persuasive or universally applicable. The discus­ sion of dramatic irony is not well informed and there is some confusion between what is referred to as “ ironie dramatique” and what is normally known in French terminology as quiproquo. Part II (which according to the book’s subtitle purports to be “ une théorie de l’ironie moderne sur les traces de Gide dans Paludes”) would have benefited from a close reading of Fillaudeau’s excellent study of Gide’s soties (L'Univers ludique d ’André Gide). The dis­ cussion of Paludes seems arbitrary at times, if not poorly focused and unrelated to the gen­ eral topic of the volume. The chapter on “Paludes et la modernité” (pp. 227-41), despite the useful information it offers in surveying Gide studies in general since 1968, seems quite extraneous to what is presumably the main purpose of the second part of the book, i.e., an illustration of the theories outlined in Part I. Ironie paradoxale et ironie poétique is not free from stylistic blemishes. There are numerous typographical errors, anglicisms and infelicitous turns of phrase. Its author VOL. XXXII, NO. 2 109 L ’E s p r it seems to have hesitated between an essay on irony and a general study of Gide’s Paludes. She would have been well advised to develop the two parts of her book independently. M ic h a e l Is s a c h a r...