Ironia – przypadek „Oblubienicy Pana” Alberta Cohena

The article discusses Albert Cohen’s irony as one of the important figures of style in the structure of narration of the novel “Belle du Seigneur.” The figure of irony requires from the reader some mental effort, some collaboration in which he/she joins the author in the act of artistic creation. The starting point of the paper is a thesis that ironic forms lead us to reveal a diversity of ironies with the help of specific processes that relate to the work “Belle du Seigneur.” Illustrative examples of the ironies in many structural devices depend on the author’s subjective choice on the matter as the effect of its implementation. Even if one of these processes cannot always be clearly distinguishable from each other, it is possible to determine precisely the peculiar character of the irony, and to establish the following general system: parodic reversal, humorous and satirical movement, ironic neologisms, romantic irony, cosmic irony, and many other. They remind us of the famous ironists, such as Cervantes, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Voltaire, etc. The paper also attempts to indicate the function of style that irony fulfills, namely a tension of content and mode of expression joining description to a complex rhetorical design, and a means of giving an idea of overcompensation and deconstruction as well as the presumption of a dialectical meaning.