Incarceration, Alibi, Escape? Viktor Pelevin's Art of Irony

Many discussions of Viktor Pelevin's oeuvre give a nod to his irony. This essay subjects the issue to closer scrutiny. I examine key ironic modes in Pelevin's oeuvre – from stable (Augustan) irony that exposes the follies of society and humans, to a less secure Romantic irony that stresses the limits of language vis-à-vis life and selfhood, and plays with paradoxes and self-refuting speech acts, to the highly unstable postmodern irony that destabilizes all kinds of discourses and envisions the subject as an effect of narration. Both irony and self-irony run through his works but it is the latter that, I argue, is pivotal to Pelevin's poetics. Pelevin constructs ironic mechanisms by which the narrative turns on itself, and directs ironic ire at himself as much as at external targets (everyday concepts and values). This multiplication of ironies, I hypothesize, suggests authorial attempts to escape his own bounds and is analogous to a key motif of Pelevin's works – his protagonists' struggle to make a break from their prison-like existences.