1
The Hipster as Critic
IN HIS 1957 Dissent essay âThe White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,â Norman Mailer paints a grim portrait of âthe psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind.â The postwar world, Mailer argues, confronted Americans with an existentially novel situation, the prospect that they might die âas a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city.â1 Perhaps unsurprisingly for a novelist of his titanic egotism, Mailer cared less that he faced a greater chance of death than that he might die among a crowd, âunknown, unhonored, and unremarked,â separated from the machinery of social recognition. Mass death exceeds its empirical effects for Mailer, threatening to extinguish not only life but also honor and dignity. And yet, in this essay, Mailer celebrates not himself and his own worthy achievements but rather the cultural hero perhaps most capable of matching, if not exceeding, his apocalyptic self-regard. For the âAmerican existentialist,â the type best able to navigate this âbleak scene,â is not the novelist but instead âthe hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war . . . then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperative of the self.â2
Over fifty years later, Mailerâs grandiose claims about the hipster appear more quaint than revolutionary. His invocation of black experience and claimed insight into the psychic effects of racism are themselves troublingly racist in how they characterize black male sexuality. And his celebration of the political power of the male orgasm, the supposed solution to the problem of totalitarian terror, evinces Mailerâs infamous sexism. Finally, the ârebellious imperative of the selfâ he here extols can today seem like little more than a juvenile pose motivated by the desire to achieve distinction as well as a marketable image that advertisers hope will motivate teenaged consumers to buy sneakers, music players, and carbonated sugar water. Malcolm Cowley had already in 1934 trenchantly diagnosed the Bohemian lifestyle of Greenwich Village as, at root, a âconsumption ethic,â observing that âself-expression and paganism encouraged a demand for all sorts of productsâmodern furniture, beach pajamas, cosmetics, colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match,â that â[l]iving for the moment meant buying an automobile, radio or house, using it now and paying for it tomorrow.â3 Andrew Hoberek is thus correct to locate the ultimate legacy of Mailerâs essay in âthe tendency of cultural studies to celebrate âtransgressiveâ politics of style, thereby romanticizing those excluded from power rather than seeking to open power upâ for the powerless.4 Writing about a more recent pedigree of Bohemian rebel, the contemporary gentrifiers of Wicker Park in Chicago, who are also called âhipsters,â the sociologist Richard Lloyd has made a similar point about the fundamental compatibility of consumerism and counterculture. Neo-Bohemian âresistance to the terms of bureaucratized, âcorporateâ labor-force participation,â it turns out, ânow contributes to the ready acceptance by educated intellectuals of manual-labor jobs in the post-Fordist entertainment industry.â5 In other words, twenty-somethings with college degrees, determined to escape the corporate âmachine,â often celebrate low-paying jobs (as waiters and bartenders) as signs of rebellious freedom and personal fulfillment, rather than seeing their new jobs as signs of downward social mobility. Skeptical readings of the hipster emphasize, quite accurately, that the postwar consumer economy had special use for a countercultural population of âwhite negroes,â workers forced to embrace a Protestant ethic in the office on pain of unemployment who (frustrated by disempowered work lives) lived in a state of perpetual Bohemian carnival while off the clock.6 Rebellious imperative of the self, indeed.
Whatever criticisms we might justly make of the countercultural romance of the margins, we should not so easily dismiss the hipster, for he is also a figure with a significant literary history, one which exceeds Mailerâs misguided celebration of him. By studying the hipster, the Ur-ironist of postwar lifeâa character type many artists and intellectuals thought was best adapted to the age of abundanceâwe can reconstruct the foundations of our contemporary picture of irony and, in doing so, revise many deeply ingrained assumptions about its subversive power. The hipster was a negative type, an ambiguously racialized figure that aimed for pure negation, often in the name of liberation, defined more by what he disavowed or stood against than by what he fought for. Despite the doubt some have expressed about the viability of consumerist rebellion, many critics have continued to see the hipsterâs political significance in his mastery of codes of consumption. In his classic No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Andrew Ross gives one version of this argument, writing that the hipster âstands in a similar, structural relationship to cultural capital as does the intellectual.â7 Hip is âa mobile taste formation that closely registers shifts in respect / disrespect towards popular tasteâ8 Part of what makes it âmobileâ for Ross is that hip functions differently for lower-class and middle-class hipsters. Whereas lower-class hipsters are overinformed about popular tastes, middle-class hipsters pretend to be underinformed, to engage directly with popular life. What may be surprising to those who adopt Rossâs view, however, is the degree to which those writing in the midcenturyâs highbrow cultural forums (Partisan Review, Dissent, Commentary, The Noble Savage) saw hipness not only as a âtaste formationâ or attitude toward consumption, but also as a specimen of political awareness, a critical tool whose use went well beyond âadvanced knowledge about the illegitimate.â9 Armed with hip knowingness, critics hoped to oppose what Dwight Macdonald called âmidcultâ or what Theodore Roszak called âtechnocratic society.â10 Hipness promised nothing less than, as Scott Saul has put it, âa new way of living,â a way to chart the limits of American freedom.11 All hipsters, of whatever class position, saw power as a function of knowledge, curated taste, and strategic consumption. Hip was a theory of power.
In studying the history of this hip ethos, we should heed the musicologist Phil Fordâs warning that contemporary critics have tended to discuss hipness in terms of âthe most extreme and marginal figures . . . rather than the less exotic (but more commonplace) kinds of people for whom hipness was less the point of existence than a happenstance of it.â12 Even the most extreme individual hipsters, those whose lives might serve as case studies for students of hip subculture, never embodied hipness in some pure way, but instead stood in relation to a contested public image of the hipster as a figure, a midcentury racial fantasy jointly constructed by a range of intellectuals and artists. It is this public image of the hipster, and the fight to fix the meaning of this image, that I take as my object of study. Michael Szalay has argued that hipness served the Democratic Party as an important ideological component of a political-literary strategy for reconciling white professionals with African Americans. The concept of hipness helped white liberals imagine that they could inhabit black bodies, taking on a âsecond skin.â13 It created an acceptable way to âappeal to blacks without alienating racist whites.â14 Drawing heavily on Mailer, and Mailerâs claim that John F. Kennedy was âthe Hipster as Presidential Candidate,â Szalay gives a persuasive account of one facet of the hipsterâs cultural history. But the hipsterâs political significance goes well beyond Democratic electoral strategy.
The hipster indeed facilitated a racial fantasy wherein white bodies might rebrand themselves as black, thus (it was imagined) frustrating a white mass society. But the hipster did more. He symbolically resisted the dominant culture using attitudinal strategies that intellectuals and critics increasingly prized. Ironyâso hard to detect in the intensity of Mailerâs overheated proseâwas the hipsterâs primary attitudinal weapon in his war against mainstream conformity and square life. The hipsterâs irony, his mastery of symbolic manipulation, harmonized with emerging white-collar fantasies of professional labor at midcentury. At a moment when writers came to see themselves as âcultural educators and national therapistsâ who worked in a world where âsocial reality is determined by ideas and values disseminated by intellectuals within the rapidly expanding new class,â the hipsterâs expert use of irony as a political weapon was nearly irresistible.15 Irony was especially important for a specific subset of professionalsâthat is, intellectuals and criticsâwho thought they did a unique kind of knowledge work, who imagined themselves as manipulators not of information but of meaning.16 These assumptions inform Cleanth Brooksâs essay âIrony as a Principle of Structure,â a classic New Critical statement that identifies the âcompelling reasonsâ that âmodern poetryâ emphasizes irony, which he defines as âthe acknowledgement of the pressures of contextâ on poetic meaning.17 Among these compelling reasons are âthe breakdown of common symbolism; . . . the general skepticism as to universals; . . . the depletion and corruption of the very language itself, by advertising and by the mass-produced arts of radio, the moving picture, and pulp fiction.â18 Irony, in this programmatic New Critical argument, is not just a structural principle that constitutes all poetry but also a weapon in a war of taste waged against âa public corrupted by Hollywood and the Book of the Month club, . . . a public sophisticated by commercial art.â19 Brooksâs argument depends on a crucial, undefended conflation of fact and value. For the New Critic, irony is simultaneously the objective, structural property of all poems, even those that seem nonironic (like lyric poetry); what the professional critic must learn how to discover in these poems (through the practice of close reading); and the poetâs preferred strategy for dealing with the depravities of modern culture, what every good poet ought to want to do. Because it guarantees that no poem is ever identical to its own denotative information, irony renders paraphrase not only heretical but also impossible.20 At the same time, once it is encoded in an object, irony must replicate itself in the cognitive faculty of the discerning critic, who will need to cultivate the capacity to read doubly. Without the criticâs taking up the normative mantle of ironic reading, irony will in some sense perish on the page. Ironyâs survival and efficacy crucially depend on the criticâs willingness to hone a particular ethos, a characteristic way of being in the world, defined by oneâs manner of interpreting that world. Pursuing this cultural program, the postwar modernist poet-critic and the hipster stand togetherâironic, knowing, wittingâagainst technocratic society, mass consumerism, and white-collar (not to mention white) conformity. The postwar hipster thus fused a specific social ontology (society as the arena of symbolic struggle), a hermeneutic strategy (close reading), and a normative attitude (irony).
The startling similarity of the postwar modernist poet-critic and the hipsterâtheir common sense of superiority, justified in terms of knowingness, the convergence of highbrow intellectual culture and counterculture at midcenturyâis starkly visible in Ralph Ellisonâs Invisible Man (1952) and Thomas Pynchonâs V. (1963). Like Mailer and other midcentury intellectuals, Ellison and Pynchon looked to African American vernacular and popular culture for the resources with which they might devise strategies to survive middlebrow society. For both authors, becoming an intellectual hipster or hipster intellectual was a way to achieve an aesthetic dĂ©tente between the modernist establishment and emerging countercultural values. Capable of supping from very different founts of prestige, the hipster promised to liberate language and undermine society, all while retaining literary and political credibility. Because he wrote Invisible Man at a time when the New Criticism was still relatively dynamic and ideologically in flux, Ellison adopted the title of critic with less trepidation than did Pynchon, who came of age amidst a more entrenched New Critical establishment at Cornell in the late fifties, during the Age of Criticism. Despite the significant differences in their biographiesâEllison and Pynchon are rarely read togetherâeach places critical irony and a version of the hipster at the center of his artistic vision, sharing more than literary historians have recognized.
In Invisible Man, B. P. RinehartâEllisonâs âname for the personification of chaosââis the most obvious hipster-like figure, but there is a sense in which the invisible man himself becomes, by the end of the novel, a sort of hipster, a critical ironist, if not a personification, then a manipulator of chaos.21 I will argue for this claim by juxtaposing the ironic invisible man with the allegedly sincere protagonists of Richard Wrightâs fiction and by considering the invisible manâs journey toward self-perception in light of Kenneth Burkeâs theory of symbolic action. Pynchon brings the hipster and the critic together in different ways: first, in his rendition of the free-jazz saxophonist McClintic Sphere, a character modeled on Ornette Coleman, whom Pynchon watched at the Five Spot CafĂ© in the Bowery during the late fifties, and second, by structuring V....