ABSTRACT
The Aristotelian concepts of recognition and reversal were employed to characterize the dynamic quality of irony as a movement from an appearance to a contrasting ‘reality’. This led incidentally to an identification of the roles involved in irony either as a game for two or as a mode of apprehension for the ‘ironically developed’. The archetypal victim of irony is, per contra, man, seen as trapped and submerged in time and matter, blind, contingent, limited and unfree – and confidently unaware that this is his predicament. Anatole France once coupled irony and pity. The irony he valued, he said, was an irony qualified by gentleness and benevolence. Others have sought a closer relation, a concept of irony in which sympathy was an essential ingredient and no less so than detachment. A rhetorically effective, an aesthetically pleasing, or simply a striking irony owes its success; it would seem, largely to one or more of a small number of principles and factors.
