Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction by Lee Konstantinou (review)

Unlike Joel Dinerstein’s recent The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017) about jazz music, film noir, existentialism, and celebrities whose masks of emotional detachment exemplified coolness, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction does not focus on cool except for a brief nod to bohemian America. Rather, the operative word in Lou Konstantinou’s title is “irony,” and he devotes his analytic energy to exploring how irony served a handful of American creative writers as a political weapon and a countercultural tool. In so doing, he traces irony’s role and position in the period of postmodernism, situating irony as the capacity to perceive disjunctions in the world. Cool Characters does not purport to be a study of American literary history; it does not discuss the Beat writers (except William S. Burroughs) nor American satirists such as Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller, whose employment of irony would certainly have made them appropriate for this work. Nor does this book examine irony as a humorous rhetorical device, as a review in Studies in American Humor might suggest or as a study of comic writers would imply it did.

Rather, Cool Characters traces a trajectory of irony across five character-ological types—the hipster, the punk, the believer, the cool hunter, and the occupier—showing how each is embedded in cultural and economic frames in America from World War II to the present. Konstantinou divides these figures into two groups by their incorporation of countercultural irony (part 1) or contemporary postirony (part 2). More than a linguistic device, irony in Konstantinou’s scheme becomes a characterological model that is both a figure and also an ethos, a rhetorical position and a cultivated perspective, and he defends this model at length in his introduction, drawing on numerous theorists. He argues that the narrator within the literary text uses irony as a speech act to build credibility but that irony is also a disposition, a self-discipline by which the character exists consciously, that is, objectively, in the world.

In the first part, Konstantinou traces the hipster as a figure excluded from the mainstream but who can perceive and manipulate the symbolic logic of life. The hipster uses irony as it is typically understood; that is, he performs his knowingness between what was said and what was meant, thus evading political systems of semiotic totalitarianism. The use of irony in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man not only legitimizes the author, gaining him entry into a modernist literary tradition (as opposed to black protest literature), but also universalizes the narrator through his deliberate construction of self. Turning to Thomas Pynchon, Konstantinou appraises his education in New Criticism at Cornell and sees his use of hipster irony as oscillating between two polarities: modernist experimentation and the countercultural style of the Beats. Pynchon transcends this binary in his novel V through the character of McClintic Sphere, the free-style jazz saxophonist. In the next chapter, Konstantinou discusses works such as Burroughs’s The Wild Boys and Kathy Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates and the ironic disposition of their characters manifested in a punk aesthetic, an attitude of alienation understood through capitalist terms, such as, for example, the “trade deficit” (105) between their educational achievements and their economic roles. He takes the contrary stance that far from being an anticapitalist movement, punk’s DIY emphasis wields capitalist ideologies strategically. Differing from hipster irony, the radicalism of punk irony breaks down linguistic and cultural foundations of political power and eschews any binary that writers such as Pynchon sought to transcend. Using irony to arrest language, punk creates a space for self-made capitalist endeavors. Punk artists project the new postindustrial city, and, as cities are justification for capitalism, punk’s reorganization of the postindustrial city is “an authentic prolepsis of a new mode of urbanism” (111). Burroughs’s Wild Boys are punks because they behave aggressively, just as the media industry does, while Acker’s punk parodic artist, like a venture capitalist...