Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

A MERICAN LITERATURE R EADINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons

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Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut Edited by David Simmons Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682–1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion By Denise Mary MacNeil Norman Mailer’s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest Edited by John Whalen-Bridge Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities By Mary Jane Hurst Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature By Erin Mercer Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of SelfFashioning By Timothy W. Galow Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary By Georgina Colby

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Bret Easton Ellis Underwriting the Contemporary

Georgina Colby

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BRET EASTON ELLIS

Copyright © Georgina Colby, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11698–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Colby, Georgina. Bret Easton Ellis : underwriting the contemporary / Georgina Colby. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the twenty-first century) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11698–6 (hardback) 1. Ellis, Bret Easton—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PS3555.L5937Z57 2011 8139.54—dc22

2011005273

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For Eileen, Heather and Emma

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C on ten t s

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: Underwriting the Contemporary

1

1 Missing Persons: Melancholy as Symptom in Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and The Informers

23

2

An Inner Critique: Commodity Fetishism, Systemic Violence, and the Abstract Mutilated Subject in American Psycho

3 Cloning the Nineties: Cultural Amnesia, Terrorism, and Contemporary Iconoclasm in Glamorama

59 95

4 Twenty-First-Century Gothic (or post-9/11 Fatalism): Self-Parody, Reification, and the Becoming Real of Cultural and Authorial Fictions in Lunar Park

131

Coda: The Politics of Exposure: Unsafe Lines and Narratives of Conflict in Imperial Bedrooms

165

Notes

189

Bibliography

213

Index

221

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Ack now l ed gmen t s

Over the years, parts of this study have been presented at conferences at the University of Westminster and the University of Exeter. Thanks are due to those who attended these events for their stimulating comments and questions. I am indebted to Royal Holloway, University of London, for its generous support throughout the project. I would like to thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Brigitte Shull and Joanna Roberts, for their editorial support and hard work in the production of this book. The image on the cover of this book, Idris Khan’s “A Memory of New York” (2007), is an image that for me, in many ways, embodies the aesthetics of our contemporary world. I would like to thank the Victoria Miro Gallery, London, for its generosity in granting permission to use an image by such a significant contemporary photographer. Parts of this book have appeared in the essay “Repressive Desublimation and the Great Refusal in Bret Easton Ellis’s Fiction” published in Textual Practice (2011). I am grateful to the editors—in particular, Peter Boxall—for permission to reprint parts of that essay. I owe my deepest thanks and am most grateful to Robert Hampson for his unending support while I wrote this book, for his patience and his friendship. My heartfelt thanks also to Matthew Rubery for reading drafts and giving me invaluable comments from an American perspective. I have benefited enormously from comments in the earlier stages of the work from Tim Armstrong, Carol Watts, and Jennifer Bavidge, and in the later stages from some illuminating remarks from Scott Wilson. I am grateful to my family and friends, for their love and support.

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A bbr ev i at ions

LTZ ROA I AP G LP IB

Less Than Zero (London: Picador, 1984) The Rules of Attraction (London: Picador, 1987) The Informers (New York: Picador, 1991) American Psycho (London: Picador, 1994) Glamorama (London: Picador, 2000) Lunar Park (London: Picador, 2005) Imperial Bedrooms (London: Picador, 2010)

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I N T ROD U C T ION

Underwriting the Contemporary

He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia1

I understood that there was another world underneath the one that we lived in. There was something beneath the surface of things. Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

Bret Easton Ellis’s renown has never been in question. Yet it has often been the negative controversy surrounding his literary reputation that has in many ways been the source of his celebrity. In the twenty-first century, that is now changing, and a body of criticism is emerging that recognizes Ellis’s literary merit. This book is part of the groundswell in recent criticism that aims to reevaluate Bret Easton Ellis’s reputation. Many early readers of Ellis read his work as complicit with late capitalism. I will demonstrate that Ellis’s work is a process of underwriting by which he critiques the sociopolitical structures of late capitalism. “We are just reflections of our time” (G, 310) Bobby tells Jamie in a double-voiced statement in Glamorama. As professional fashion models, they are literally images of their time. Figuratively they are consequences of the cultural climate of the 1990s. Ellis’s first-person narratives are vehicles for serious thought, reflections on the contemporary. I read Ellis’s work as a contemporary form of refusal. Through their roles as cultural products, Ellis’s books function to disclose the ways in which the contemporary political and cultural apparatus affects the individual.

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My reading departs from previous studies in the following ways. I contend that Ellis’s works, through the technique of underwriting, enact a correlation of the literary and political and thereby produce a new politics of literature. This book rejects any kind of branding of Ellis as moralist, satirist, nihilist, or postmodernist. While Ellis may embody aspects of these categories, the importance of his work resides in his resistance to the very branding his media and literary critics have been so fond of performing. Thus to claim Ellis as an underwriter of the contemporary is not to push him into a category but rather to comment on his technique and to preserve and highlight the author’s duplicity. The approach this book takes to Ellis’s work, then, is to draw attention to the importance of his novels in documenting the cultural conditions of the past three decades, showing him to be a more significant writer and cultural commentator than some previous critical accounts of his work have allowed. Crucially it is not the surface narratives of Ellis’s texts that define him but his critique of what lies beneath the surface of culture. It is his complex act of underwriting that makes Ellis unique as a contemporary author. In an address written for the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, in 1934, 2 published posthumously as his essay “The Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin urged the culture of the day to reconfigure the perspective from which it approached a literary work. For Benjamin, the central question is the relation between politics and literature, of perceiving “the connection between the two factors, political line and [literary] quality.”3 In his central reformulation, Benjamin repositions the critical approach to this question from one that perceives the literary as adopting an external political position to the notion that the literary embodies the political: “Rather than asking, ‘[w]hat is the attitude of a work of art to the relations of production of its time?’ I would like to ask, ‘[w]hat is its position in them?’ ” This question, Benjamin explained, “directly concerns the function the work has within the literary relations of production of its time.”4 In other words, Benjamin claims, it is concerned “directly with the literary technique of works.”5 Benjamin was writing his address in 1934, just one year after the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933. His remarks, situated within this political context, resound with cultural urgency. It is worth repeating the question that arises from them: how does a work of literature sustain a political function on the level of literary technique? Conditioned by the imminent triumph of fascism, Benjamin’s understanding of the cultural necessity of a politically and socially resistant work of literature to further the proletarian revolution may

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seem, to some at least, inapplicable to the study of Bret Easton Ellis and indeed to the first decades of the twenty-first century. To Ellis’s early media critics, the very naming of Benjamin and Ellis in the same sentence might indeed seem inappropriate, even a perversion of Benjamin’s critical legacy. It is this attitude to Ellis’s work that in part obliges a contemporary reconsideration of the value of his oeuvre. Yet the overriding factor behind this reconsideration is the need to understand Ellis’s work precisely through asking what the position of his novels is in the cultural climates of the last three decades. To pose this question, I suggest, is to enact an opening up of a new space of representation within the literary relations of production of late twentieth-century culture. Benjamin defined technique as “the concept that makes literary products accessible to an immediately social, and therefore materialist, analysis.” For Benjamin, technique “provides the dialectical starting point from which the unfruitful antithesis of form and content can be surpassed.”6 The redemptive aesthetic in Benjamin’s work illuminates the cultural critique in Ellis’s novels. The relevance of Benjamin’s thinking to the present study resides in facilitating the disclosure of a new politics of literature in Ellis’s work. Underwriting emerges in this study as a contemporary literary technique that embodies a mode of political correctness in Benjamin’s formulation of the term. In “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin claims: [T]he tendency of a work can be politically correct only if it is also literarily correct. That is to say, the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency. And I would add straightaway: this literary tendency which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency of a work, alone constitutes the quality of that work. The correct political tendency of a work thus includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency.7

For Benjamin, then, the literary is political. As Richard Wolin has pointed out, “[i]n Benjamin’s eyes, it is literary technique that determines whether or not an artist is following the correct literary tendency; and thus it is the issue of technique that in the last analysis ensures the ultimate concordance between political tendency and literary quality.”8 This concept of political correctness, which correlates literary and political value in a work, stands in contrast to the idea of political correctness that pervades contemporary culture, which Slavoj Žižek identifies as the defunct mode of political correctness inherent to liberal multiculturalism.9 For Žižek, this standard political

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correctness embodies a problematic limitation by which “instead of changing the subjective position from which we speak, it imposes upon us a set of rules with regard to content . . . But all these rules on content effectively leave our subjective position untouched.”10 Throughout Ellis’s works, and indeed, by virtue of its chronological structure, through the course of this book, these two contrasting forms of political correctness become apparent. Ellis’s work embodies a form of political correctness as Benjamin conceives the term. At the same time, his novels critique the contemporary ideas of political correctness inherent to late-capitalist society and expose their limitations, not from a conservative position but from the Žižekian position that realizes the ineffectiveness of a mode of political correctness that leaves the subjective position unaffected. The idea of a politics of literature is fundamental to an understanding of the literary and political value of Ellis’s work. Jacques Rancière has recently articulated what a “politics of literature” might mean for the contemporary world: The politics of literature is not the same thing as the politics of writers. It does not concern the personal engagements of writers in the social or political struggle of their times. Neither does it concern the way writers represent social structures, political movements or various identities in their books. The expression ‘politics of literature’ implies that literature does politics simply by being literature. It assumes that we don’t need to worry about whether writers should go in for politics or stick to the purity of their art instead, but that this very purity has something to do with politics. It assumes that there is an essential connection between politics as a specific form of collective practice and literature as a well-defined practice of the art of writing.11

Rancière’s distinction here between the politics of literature and the politics of writers is critical to understanding the politics of literature that occurs in Ellis’s novels. The space of representation that Ellis’s works create offers a different way of perceiving the contemporary. Each of Ellis’s novels functions to underwrite the contemporary cultural apparatus of which it is a part. The act of underwriting, like Ellis’s narratives, is duplicitous. Ellis transforms the contemporary into literature through a writerly act that inscribes contemporary conditions onto his surface narratives. One meaning of the verb “to underwrite” is “words, statements, etc: written (out), expressed in writing, below or beneath; following upon, coming after, what is already written.”12 Ellis, through the process of double-voicing, writes narratives below the surface narrative of both his work and of the contemporary

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culture of which his works are (intentionally) products. Yet he also underwrites in the legal definition of the term by supporting and guaranteeing the contemporary. He takes responsibility to disclose the cultural and political apparatus instrumental in the oppression of the individual within that social apparatus. His work guarantees to unveil the sociopolitical workings in American culture that are not always immediately visible to those who are part of that culture. His method is not to allude directly to a subjective political opinion but instead, through a process of exposure, to reveal the underside of contemporary culture. Benjamin claimed that “[t]he best political tendency is wrong if it does not demonstrate the attitude with which it is to be followed. And this attitude the writer can demonstrate only in his particular activity—that is, in writing. A political tendency is necessary but never sufficient condition for the organizing function of a work.”13 I want to bring to light Ellis’s process of underwriting as a contemporary technique that correlates literary and political value through the transformation of the contemporary into literature and the subsequent critique of that narrative. Perhaps Ellis’s act of underwriting can be most productively compared with Don DeLillo’s idea of the “counternarrative,” which he wrote of in his 2001 essay “In The Ruins of the Future.”14 DeLillo’s notion has its origins in his 1997 essay, “ ‘The Power of History.”15 For DeLillo, the counternarrative enters into a relation with counterhistory. “A fiction writer feels the nearly palpable lure of large events and it can make him want to enter the narrative,”16 DeLillo states. DeLillo’s notion of a counternarrative is predicated on the basis that there is a historical narrative that constitutes these large events. “The novel,” DeLillo writes, “is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.”17 For Ellis, the novel is not a liberating form of escapism. There is no clear historical narrative to enter; rather there is only the sociopolitical and ideological condition in which the subject exists, a refutation of which necessitates a critique from within. The contemporary has no coordinates and therefore possesses no entry point or exit point. The subject of contemporary culture in Ellis’s novels is always already within, immeasurably reified and engrained in the contemporary moment that has no graspable linear history preceding it. This is not, as many critics have assumed, to define Ellis as a postmodern writer. This book proposes that Ellis is a contemporary writer who, in his early works that were considered “postmodern” by critics such as Elizabeth Young, in fact critiques postmodernism, along with its twin political ally, neoliberalism. The technique of underwriting

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reopens the “the crucial philosophical distinction between essence and appearance” that Richard Wolin, among others, see postmodernism as relinquishing.18 Ellis represents and mocks the postmodernist abnegation of opposites in his surface narratives of Less Than Zero, American Psycho, The Informers, and Glamorama, and it is his act of writing beneath the spectacle that opens up a literary space between essence (literary critique) and appearance (surface narrative). In this way, the practice of underwriting creates a dialectical literary space that supplements the contemporary.19 For this reason, an understanding of the “contemporary” that is definitively not conflated with postmodernism is essential to an understanding of Ellis’s work and the resistance to cultural assimilation that his works effect. To read Ellis is to involuntarily enter into the problematics of defining the contemporary. The etymology and conception of the “contemporary” has been the focus of many debates since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks’s edited collection, Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present (1999), is a significant contribution to these debates. In particular, the essays by Stephen Connor20 and Peter Osborne provide a useful assessment of the problematics of temporality in the “contemporary.” The absence of linear history in Ellis’s work is not an absence of temporal existence. Instead it is a rejection of totalising or unifying temporalities. Peter Osborne has remarked, in his essay “The Politics of Time,” that all politics involves “struggles over the experience of time,” and he questions how the forms of the social practices in which we engage, structure, and produce work, function to enable or skew our different sense of time.21 Time is an important factor, as experience in Ellis’s novels is not structured by a totalizing temporality but instead by the subjective detotalized time of his depersonalized narrators. Time is dislocated by their reified vision and the solipsism of their aesthetic perception. The notable exception to this statement would be the twelve days in which the narrative of Lunar Park takes place, a novel written in the past tense. Yet Ellis’s parody of Bret, as chapter 4 shows, is precisely an act of underwriting the political imposition of conformity and censorship on society, the individual, and by extension, the American writer, in the post-9/11 climate. Thus the time of Bret’s narrative is underwritten by Ellis as an injunction of stifling temporal conformity by a culture of fear and is juxtaposed with Bret’s posttraumatic psychological temporal dislocation. Apart from Lunar Park, Ellis’s relentless use of the present tense and first-person narration has the effect of creating the experience of detemporalized time. Yet, while

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the novels are not grounded in specific time, they are firmly established as products of a cultural period and its sociopolitical climate. In the trajectory of Ellis’s work, these periods are the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Perhaps it is in part the lack of a specific confining narratological temporality that evokes the sense that the experience of the narrator in Ellis’s novels is the wider experience of the subject within the decade that he is underwriting. It is worth rethinking Ellis’s relation to other contemporary authors. While his work has invited moral and ethical interpretations by critics such as Elizabeth Young and Naomi Mandel, respectively, I suggest that Ellis refrains from adopting a moral or ethical stance in his novels. This is one aspect of his authorship that makes his work slippery. Ellis’s technique of underwriting is an act that discloses the damage inflicted by capitalist globalization on traditional ethical structures, yet this is not to claim that Ellis has a specific subjective moral or ethical stance that is clearly disseminated in his fiction. For this reason, he should be set apart from authors such as Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Paul Auster. Ellis’s use of the first-person narrative, his critique of sociopolitical conditions along with his method of using explicit violence as a representative tool in many ways warrant a comparison instead with the work of Hubert Selby Jr. Ellis’s narrators are always in a position of class and social privilege, and Selby’s narratorial voices (a fusion of firstand third-person narrative voices), by contrast, are predominantly from the disaffected social classes in America. Nevertheless, both authors have a shared radical aesthetic and a desire to unveil the oppressive cultural forces in America that inflict violence on the individual. However, Selby’s characters and their idiolects are very real, and the force of Selby’s novels comes from this deep-rooted realism. This is not the case with Ellis’s depersonalized narrators, who are narratological constructs perpetually undermined by their own fictionality. In his use of elements of satire, Ellis has often been paired with Chuck Palahniuk. Both authors articulate forms of despair in the contemporary subject and share a radical use of violence and humor for productive means. Benjamin’s claim that “there is no better trigger for thinking than laughter” and his assertion that the “convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than the convulsion of the soul”22 seems appropriate to articulate Ellis’s and Palahniuk’s sharp and often cynical narrative jocularity. However, Ellis stands apart from Palahniuk in the scope of his cultural critique.

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Ellis’s act of underwriting arguably has a greater political dimension than Palahniuk’s satire. The Informers opens with a citation from John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939). The central protagonist of Fante’s trilogy, Arturo Bandini, in many ways appears to anticipate Ellis’s narrators. Bandini’s narrative in its detachment, unsentimentality, bound to “the weary wasted world”23 is echoed in Ellis’s narratives. Fante’s nuanced modern fatalism, which blends seamlessly with Bandini’s disengagement from other characters, is a formula Ellis’s novels develop for the contemporary world. One passage from Ask the Dust captures this: I watched her stand and take off her clothes, and somewhere out of an earthly past I remembered having seen that face of hers before, that obedience and fear, and I remembered a hut and Sammy telling her to go and get some wood. It was as I knew it was bound to be sooner or later. She crept into my arms and I laughed at her tears.24

This scene in which Arturo Bandini—whose mind, like the protagonists of Ellis’s fiction, Clay, Bateman, Victor, and Bret, progressively slips into the realms of insanity—is so detached from Camilla Lopez, it creates a sense of unease. His fatalism and the juxtaposition of Camilla’s tender movement into his embrace with Bandini’s amusement at her pain evoke a similar despondency to that found in Ellis’s novels. It is difficult not to place Ellis in the tradition of John Fante and Hubert Selby Jr. While his narratives may share with his contemporaries what Mandel terms “extreme”25 elements—violence, pornography, a radical critique—his novels also possess a blend of resisting sentimentalism while creating narrators whose insouciant narratives are laced with a certain detached yet painful distress. As Bret points out in Lunar Park, Norman Mailer commented on the “deep, dark, Dostoyevskian themes” (LP, 17)26 in American Psycho in an article for Vanity Fair in 1991. The comparison of Ellis’s work to Dostoevsky seems a little worn but remains an important observation. American Psycho opens with a citation from Notes from Underground (1864), and therefore ushers an obvious comparison between Patrick Bateman and Dostoevsky’s unnamed narrator, but arguably a more productive comparison resides in the structure of Ellis’s and Dostoevsky’s narratives: their use of doublevoicing and first-person narration (Ich-Erzählung 27). Henrik Skov Nielsen addresses these elements in his work on Ellis and narrative with admirable complexity.28 It is worth offering here the observation that there is an overt structural parallel between Lunar Park

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and Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871). In Demons, the opening section is titled “Instead of an Introduction: A Few Details from the Biography of the Much-Esteemed Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky”29 and, while the opening is narrated in the third person, in contrast to Bret’s autobiography,30 the opening of Lunar Park can be read as a contemporary appropriation of Verkhovensky’s biography. Ellis’s composite narrative technique, which is compounded of such diverse narrative elements, distinguishes his unique authorial voice from other contemporary writers such as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers and resists the categorization of his work into one single contemporary group of writers. Benjamin demanded the writer “to think, to reflect on his position in the process of production.”31 I suggest that Ellis’s writing represents precisely such a process of reflection. Ellis’s works address the function of literature. The progress of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, in many ways witnessed the elimination of radical forces through the process of cultural assimilation. Ellis’s work demands a consideration of what constitutes the position of the author within the cultural apparatuses of the late-twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Benjamin concludes his essay “The Author as Producer” by articulating the solidarity of the bourgeois writer with the proletariat. Ellis is far from an avowed Marxist: his novels do not make direct reference to the class struggle, although they do address the alienating effects of global capitalism upon both the white American middle class and those exploited and economically impoverished in American culture. Although Ellis is not a self-proclaimed Marxist, the comments of French Marxist historian René Maublanc, whom Benjamin cites, are relevant here. He states that, first and foremost, he writes for the bourgeois out of obligation. But secondly, and apropos here, Maublanc claims he does so “because I have bourgeois origins and a bourgeois education and come from a bourgeois milieu, and so am naturally inclined to address myself to the class to which I belong, which I know and understand best. This does not mean, however, that I write in order to please or support it.”32 In his novels, Ellis is concerned with the bourgeois American individual. His is a very American liberal concern for the liberation of the individual. While at points throughout this study a Marxist approach is adopted to analyze Ellis’s work—such as in chapter 2, whereby an understanding of commodity fetishism functions to illuminate the suppression of the subject in 1980s American culture—this is not to imply that Ellis’s own concern is directly Marxist. Ellis references Marxist writers in American Psycho such as Brecht and Hugo, and Debord in

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Glamorama, suggesting an aesthetic affinity with them (rather than an intrinsic political affiliation). Across his body of work, Ellis both employs Adorno-esque cultural criticism and parodies and mocks this mode of cultural criticism, particularly with regard to the culture industry.33 The critical work of the Frankfurt School forewarned of a bleak future if no political action was taken against the forces of domination inherent to advanced industrial society in the 1960s. The work of the Frankfurt School, in particular Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, can be read as a way of analyzing the advanced state of repressive desublimation in which the subject of contemporary commodity culture exists. Marcuse defines repressive desublimation as the “flattening out of antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of oppositional, alien and transcendent elements in higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality.” Importantly Marcuse explains: “[T]his liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values,’ but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.”34 Slavoj Žižek has taken the notion of repressive desublimation further in recent years in his critique of the psychoanalytic social theory of the Frankfurt School and his offer of a Lacanian revision of repressive desublimation as a progressive alternative.35 Ellis’s novels critique the notion of repressive desublimation and its effects on the subject of contemporary culture while resisting the process through parody, double-voicing, and the dialectical play his novels act between high and low culture. Throughout his life, Marcuse was troubled by the impasse that his society faced. He asked “[h]ow can the administered individuals— who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions, and thus reproduce it on a large scale - liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious cycle be broken?”36 I suggest that in Ellis’s work, a new politics of literature is present, which manifests this “vicious cycle” in order to subvert it. In many ways, Ellis’s work can be thought of as a consequence of the past forty years of repressive desublimation. Through positioning himself as underwriter, Ellis criticizes Americanism from within that culture, simultaneously dispelling the reductionist belief in U.S. exceptionalism and offering a critical authorial voice from within present-day American culture, which through duplicity resists assimilation into that culture. In this vein, there is a parallel between his cynicism and the need to refrain from

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Utopian speculation that underlies Marcuse’s critical theory in An Essay on Liberation. Marcuse observed that one of the most destructive effects of desublimation is that: “The rebellious music, literature, art are thus easily absorbed and shaped by the market—rendered harmless.”37 Here there is a clear parallel with Benjamin’s concerns in 1934 regarding the possibility of radical literature. He states that in the past decade: “[A] considerable proportion of so-called left-wing literature possessed no other social function than to wring from the political situation a continuous stream of novel effects for the entertainment of the public.”38 Ellis clearly represents the assimilation of high culture into low culture in his novels, yet the media backlash to the publication of American Psycho is enough to show that this process of assimilation does not occur with Ellis’s actual works. The controversy surrounding the publication of the book secured Ellis a place in a lineage of literary controversies in the late twentieth century, which includes the obscenity trials of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1961 and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in 1966. Perhaps the most fervent critic of American Psycho was Tammy Bruce, past president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), who started a campaign for the national boycott of the book. Feminist academics such as Tara Baxter and Nikki Craft followed suit. Their essay title “There Are Better Ways of Taking Care of Bret Easton Ellis Than Just Censoring Him . . .” speaks for itself.39 Others followed, such as Roger Rosenblatt in the New York Times Book Review and Norman Mailer (who stated that it should be published but that he would in no way defend it). Rosa A. Eberly studied sixty articles on American Psycho published between October 1990 and April 1991 for her invaluable study of literary public spheres. She remarked that “publicity plays the role of an explicit agent in many of the discourses about American Psycho [. . .] ultimately, publicity resulted in the novel’s becoming a bestseller.”40 She also observes that, along with the huge emphasis on publicity, there was “the consistent recognition by those who wrote about American Psycho that the book was a marketed commodity.”41 The conception of the book as a commodity led scholars writing in the nineties, such as Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney, to conclude that Ellis’s work ultimately did not resist the forces of cultural assimilation. Young’s literary criticism of Ellis was important in establishing Ellis as an author who deserved critical attention. Yet Young’s essay, while reading Patrick’s killings as a satirical comment on democracy,42 still tended to conceive Ellis’s novels as uniquely assimilable by the culture in which he

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wrote. James Annesley’s study, Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel (1998), remains perhaps the most authoritative and groundbreaking work in the canon of Ellis’s early critics. Yet he also concludes that American Psycho can “be read as a text that participates in the processes of commercialisation and objectification that were the very forces it set out to satirise.”43 I suggest that Ellis’s novels effectively offer modes of resistance precisely because of their perfidy. On the one hand, the surface narratives do not attempt to resist being absorbed into commodity culture but instead inscribe that culture. Yet, through a process of underwriting, Ellis’s works preserve their instability and are in this way dangerous. Through double-voiced narratives, Ellis uses the dominating power of his texts as commodity objects in a subversive way. Furthermore, in an act of dialogism between his text and the public sphere, he assimilates his critics. In Glamorama, Tammy Bruce becomes Tammy and Bruce, two of the leading members of the terrorist ring. Roger Kimball, the conservative critic who reduced American Psycho to “an incident in the annals of contemporary American publicity”44 in the Wall Street Journal, is echoed in Donald Kimball, the detective who first appears in American Psycho and then reappears in Lunar Park to investigate the copycat murders of Patrick Bateman. “He held a copy of American Psycho. It was frayed and yellowed and ominously dotted with Post-its . . . When I asked if he wanted it signed,” Bret reports, “Kimball paused grimly, thanked me and said that he did not” (LP, 174). By assimilating his critics within the narratives of his later texts, the text itself acquires the power of reification of the Marxist commodity form. Through this process of inversion, the novels enact their resistance against the exploitative power of the market forces to absorb and shape their modes of expression. Underwriting then is a dialectical technique, which correlates the literary and political. The space of literature that Ellis creates enables his fiction to be both immanent to the present and also to transcend it, since its referential locus is ultimately literature and the literary tradition. In the new temporality of the contemporary climate, Ellis’s writing raises questions of authorship and self-referentiality, particularly his twenty-first century writing. Indeed, Lunar Park is two books: the overarching narrative of the author himself, and the parody of his authorship as conceived by the press in the narrative of Bret. Both novels begin with the same lines: “You do an awfully good impression of yourself.” By these means, Ellis’s writing questions the traditional ethical structures of the bourgeois individual and the bourgeois press. Ellis’s act of double-voicing allows him to develop

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a duplicitous recalcitrant voice, and it is double-voicing that emerges as the key technique in Ellis’s work that effects an ongoing critique in commodity society. Mikhail Bakhtin observed: “When there is a deliberate (conscious) multiplicity of styles, there are always dialogic relations among the styles.”45 What is fundamental to Ellis’s technique of underwriting is that he creates dialogic relations between author and reader as well as the reader and the undetermined speakers in his texts. As in Dostoevsky’s novels, Ellis’s implied author and his aware reader always know more than his narrators. The eliciting of fear through the ignorance of his narrator calls to mind Ernest Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Hemingway’s influence on Ellis’s work has been recognized since the publication of his first novel Less Than Zero. The double-voicing of the narrative is mirrored by the double functioning of the text as object. Indeed, it is the very repressive elements of culture that Ellis is attacking that preserve and fortify the seditious claims of his work. Knowingly ensnared in the political and economic processes he is describing, Ellis’s novels function both as artifacts of commodity society and as instruments of a critique that brings to light those political and economic processes. Marcuse stated, “[a]ll liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude.”46 Ellis’s act of underwriting results in the formation of an awareness of this servitude in the reader that marks the force of his tacit refusal. Ellis not only represents the alienating effects of the forces of advanced capitalism at work today, but, through his critique of the individual in contemporary “affluent society,” effectively creates a dialectical discourse between domination and liberation. As well as being illuminated by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, however, Ellis’s critique of advanced capitalist society constitutes a departure from this school of thought, one which disrupts and contests the paradigms set out by the revolutionary theorists of the sixties as well as the contemporary revisions of these paradigms by later cultural theorists such as Žižek. Thus, the proximity of thinkers such as Marcuse and Adorno to Ellis as critical voices becomes apparent, but so too does the disjunction between their modes of political praxis. Ellis’s narrators can be read as varying types of the “mutilated, ‘abstract’ individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him (given in a literal sense), who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated.”47 As a result of this “factual repression,” Marcuse claims “the experienced world is a result of a restricted experience, and the positive cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with the restricted experience.”48

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Creating duplicity through double-voicing, asserting the text as commodity, and indeed, Ellis’s refusal, are contingent upon the culture he seeks to critique. It is precisely by trapping the reader within the monological narratives of his one-dimensional narrators that Ellis’s fiction works to critique this restricted experience. In this way, Ellis’s texts disrupt both Marcuse’s paradigm of one-dimensionality and Adorno’s notion of total reification. Reification, Timothy Bewes writes at the outset of his seminal study, “refers to the moment that a process or relation is generalized into an abstraction, and thereby turned into a ‘thing.’ ”49 The predominant mode of reification today is still rooted in Marxist theories of labor, whereby “reification is what happens when workers are installed in a place within the capitalist mode of production, and thus reduced to a machine part.”50 Fundamentally for Bewes: “In each case, reification is the process in which ‘thing-hood’ becomes the standard of objective reality; the ‘given world’, in other words, is taken to be the truth of the world.”51 This process of reification is clearly apparent in Ellis’s surface narratives. Julian Murphet has commented briefly on the notions of alienation and reification in his analysis of American Psycho. For Murphet, the importance of reification resides in the erasure of expression that takes place as an effect of the process.52 Murphet’s account of reification describes the immersion of Bateman into the consumer products he is obsessed with. Murphet defines reification simply as “the transformation of intensely private human relations into things, tableaux, props, pieces.”53 Reification is significant to an understanding of Ellis’s work because the author’s concerns are specifically rooted in the effects of capitalism upon the contemporary subject. As Martin Jay has recently pointed out, in his Introduction to Axel Honneth’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values, given at Berkeley in 2005, during the 1960s, “[t]he concept of reification became a powerful weapon in the struggle not only to define what capitalism did to its victims but also to explain why they were unable to resist it successfully.”54 Having experienced a lull in the latter part of the twentieth century, the notion of reification has attracted renewed critical attention in the twentyfirst century, leading critics to interrogate the role reification plays in the contemporary world.55 Indeed, Honneth approaches reification in terms of the need in the contemporary era for recognition, over the forgetting that reification engenders.56 For Honneth, “ ‘[r]eification’ correspondingly signifies a habit of thought, a habitually ossified perspective, which, when taken up by the subject, leads not only to the loss of her capacity for empathetic engagement, but also to the world’s loss of its qualitatively disclosed character.”57 Part of the applicability of the

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concept of reification to Ellis’s work is the very complexity and ambiguity that the concept harbors, and thus the compass of the concept of reification itself allows the shifting modes in which it is found in Ellis’s work. Ellis’s critique of capitalism extends to globalization through exhibiting the “reified forms of consciousness”58 in his narrators. As Bewes remarks, as “the ‘cosmopolitan’ effect of the bourgeois mode of production” prophesised by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, globalization is the “rarefied form of the logic of capitalism itself.”59 Bewes declares that the lack of “concretion” inherent to the notion of reification is precisely the point of the concept. Like Ellis as an author, reification is slippery. Bewes draws on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which “consciousness is determined by a historical cycle of reification and dereification.” “Consciousness,” Bewes asserts, “is the product of man objectifying his thought forms, and successfully projecting himself in consciousness beyond those objectifications.”60 Ellis, through his technique of underwriting the contemporary, which reveals varying degrees of reification, moves beyond the process of reification. In this regard, we have in Ellis the contemporary form of Tretiakov’s notion of the “operating writer.” This operating writer, Benjamin states, “provides the most tangible example of the functional interdependence that always, and under all conditions, exists between the correct political tendency and progressive literary technique.” Drawing on Tretiakov’s distinction between the operating writer and the informative writer, Benjamin claims that the mission of the operating writer is “not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively.”61 Through his underwriting, Ellis’s refusal from within the commodity form performs a form of active intervention in the social fabric, and he does this by creating a mode of resistance within his book as private property that functions as an object in the social sphere of consumption. In addition, he subverts the master-slave dialectic in the critic-book relation through playing with, manipulating, and responding to critical responses to his work within his work. By this means, Ellis’s work functions to overturn his contingent social position as writer, a radical move made possible by his very reification within his product. Ellis’s authorial intervention operates on another interrelated level. The act of underwriting is a hermeneutical gesture that specifically involves the visibility of things. As Rancière remarks, “[t]he historic distinctiveness of literature is not due to a state or specific use of language” but “to a new way language can act by causing something to be seen or heard.” In short, he states, literature “is a new system of identification of

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the art of writing.”62 For Rancière, literature “is a certain way of intervening in the sharing of the perceptible that defines the world which we live in: the way in which the world is visible for us, and in which what is visible can be put into words, and the capacities and incapacities that reveal themselves accordingly.”63 In Rancière’s eyes, “[i]t is on this basis that it is possible to theorize about the politics of literature ‘as such,’ it is the mode of intervention in the carving up of objects that form a common world, the subjects that people that world and the powers they have to see it, name it and act upon it.”64 Ellis’s underwriting is precisely a mode of intervention as Rancière designates here. The reception of Ellis’s work has been influenced to a great extent by his media inflicted “Brat Pack” beginning.65 Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney’s work Shopping in Space: Essays on American “Blank Generation” Fiction (1992) and James Annesley’s study, Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel (1997), firmly establish Ellis as part of the Blank Generation, Brat Pack writers of the 1980s. As I argued earlier, this branch of early criticism tends to center upon Ellis’s work as firmly postmodernist. Nevertheless, Young and Caveney’s work forms an important part of the body of critical writing on Ellis. Ellis’s early critics are discussed further in chapter 1, in which the term “blank” is recast from its implications of an affectless sensibility rendered blank by consumerism to a melancholic blankness, a turning away of the subject from the world. Recently Naomi Mandel and Alain-Philippe Durand co-edited an important volume of essays on contemporary fiction, which sought to build on the earlier understanding of the Blank Generation writers. Their collection, Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (2006), brings together radical contemporary writers from both sides of the Atlantic, placing Ellis alongside writers such as Richard Morgiève, Josée Yvon, and Frédéric Beigbeder, among others. Mandel and Durand explain that the term “extreme” “was deliberately chosen for its connotations with political extremity and a fascination with transgression.”66 This is an important development, both for contemporary literary studies and for an understanding of Ellis’s work, and, although the volume acknowledges its debt to critics of the “Blank Generation,” it takes the novels in vital new directions. In drawing attention to a “new worldwide literary phenomenon,”67 the volume establishes a critical field for radical literature. The volume includes two important essays on Ellis’s work. Henrik Skov Nielsen’s work on Ellis and narrative cannot be ignored. His earlier essay, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction,” printed in the journal Narrative (2004), reads Glamorama as an example of the “impersonal voice” in narrative.68 Nielsen’s

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work is important in expanding rudimentary remarks concerning the “unreliability” of Ellis’s narrators into a considered analysis of the narrator as a complex authorial device. Nielsen’s essay in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, ‘Telling Doubles and Literal-Minded Reading in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama’, builds on his earlier analysis. Nielsen’s focus on the importance of narrative in Ellis’s work marks a significant development in Ellis criticism that signaled a break with the earlier “Blank Generation” critics. Naomi Mandel’s essay, “ ‘Right Here in Nowheres’: American Psycho and Violence’s Critique” offers perhaps the most forwardthinking response to violence in the novels to date. The critical coverage of the issue of violence in Ellis’s novels is extensive. Mandel understands the importance of violence in American Psycho as “a confrontation that generates a space of ethical engagement with violence but avoids the resurrection of dichotomies that current responses to the novel inevitably perform.”69 Mandel thus interprets violence as critique in the novel. Mandel is correct to point to the habit of existing responses to the novel as “resurrecting dichotomies.” On the one hand, critics (particularly the media response) assume that the violence in the novel is real. On the other hand, as Mandel points out, critics such as Carla Freccero,70 Elizabeth Young, and Marco Abel71 view the novel in terms of aesthetics, treating the book as an aesthetic object. The present study breaks with previous readings of violence in Ellis’s novels through an engagement with Slavoj Žižek’s recent study Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008).72 Throughout Ellis’s oeuvre, violence is used in complex and subtle ways to represent the unseen violence imposed on the individual. Žižek distinguishes a triumvirate of violence at work in the contemporary world. Firstly, he articulates “subjective violence.” This is the most visible form of violence, “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.”73 Two other “objective” forms of violence exist: “symbolic violence,” which is “embodied in language and its forms,” and “systemic” violence, or “the catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.”74 In Žižek’s formulation, “subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a nonviolent zero level,” whereas “objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very level zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”75 The articulation of these forms of objective violence that are located within what is perceived to be the “ ‘normal’ state of things” is of central importance to Ellis’s act of underwriting. Žižek compares systemic violence to the “notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics,” asserting it as “the

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counterpart to an all-too visible subjective violence.” While this form of violence is invisible, it has to be taken into account if “ ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence”76 are to be understood. Ellis’s use of subjective violence is read throughout this book as a representational tool to mark the invisible objective forms of violence exerted by the ideological apparatus of the decade in which he writes and that he is seeking to critique. Žižek remarks that the Austrian/American composer Arnold Schoenberg “extracted” the inner form of totalitarian terror and in doing so “evoked the way this terror affects subjectivity.”77 Ellis’s novels disclose the systemic violence inherent in capitalism and, rather like Schoenberg, reveal the way in which this violence affects subjectivity. Yet rather than performing a process of extraction, Ellis’s narratives rely on the reader to listen to the nuances of his implied narratives. In this vein, Ellis makes certain demands on his readers. Those readers who do not read intuitively into Ellis’s work are liable to be assimilated into his oblique critique of surface culture and ridiculed. Žižek identifies further individual types of violence within his triumvirate, such as ideological violence (“racism, incitement, sexual discrimination”78) and verbal violence, among others. These specific forms of violence inform an understanding of Ellis’s intricate engagement with violence. Identifying and understanding the subtle ways in which violence is used throughout Ellis’s work reveals the way in which he uses the surface of his texts, in which the contemporary epoch is laid bare, as on a canvas, which he then underwrites. Indeed, Ellis’s act of underwriting, because of its position as hidden below the surface, within the public property of the book, can be understood as a positive form of objective violence at the origin of his work. Through the process of underwriting, the novels function to expose “the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation.”79 In chapters 2 and 4, another more subtle form of violence is uncovered that is central to Ellis’s body of work. In American Psycho, the contemporary liberal form of political correctness of Ellis’s critics and their focus solely on the subjective violence in the novel can be seen as preventing an understanding of the objective violence that Ellis sought to lay bare. Furthermore, Lunar Park documents the contemporary forms of systemic violence in its depiction of the social effects of the post-9/11 politics of fear, a culture in which the “limitation of tolerance” is “the predominant notion underpinning today’s ideology.”80 Žižek functions throughout as an illuminating parallel to Ellis’s work. His engagement with high and low culture, his contemporary revisions of the Frankfurt School’s notion of repressive desublimation and the commitment of his work to document the

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changing sociopolitical and ideological discourses complement the way in which cultural change is traced in Ellis’s novels. Other noteworthy studies in the body of criticism surrounding Ellis’s work have examined Ellis’s fiction through a psychoanalytic framework. This is a critical approach that Ellis’s work lends itself to, not least by the fact that Ellis’s narrators are all variations on the figure of the narcissist. Through a critical framework that utilizes Žižek’s work, which, in turn, has its foundations in Lacanian theory, the present study in many ways builds on the psychoanalytic work while offering new paths that resist reducing the works to a single interpretation. The work of Alex E. Blazer is exemplary of this productive psychoanalytic branch of criticism. In his essay “Glamorama, Fight Club, and the Terror of Narcissistic Abjection,”81 Blazer argues “it is Victor’s death-invested narcissism that triggers a psychotic break with reality, in which he becomes the true center of the universe that is fragmenting.”82 For Blazer, the terrorism in the novel is part of Victor’s delusion. Diagnosing Victor with narcissistic personality disorder, he discusses the novel through Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, reading the real grotesque tortures in the novel as externalizing Victor’s inner death. Berthold Schoene’s brilliant essay ‘Serial Masculinity: Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho’83 argues for a psychoanalytic queer reading of American Psycho. Masculinity is another central issue in Ellis’s work, and Catherine Morley, for instance, has interpreted Lunar Park as representing the attacks of 9/11 “in terms of an assault upon American masculinity.”84 Insisting throughout on the subterfuge of Ellis’s authorial practice of underwriting and its political function as a form of refusal, this book is structured chronologically to illustrate the essential relation of his novels to the sociopolitical and ideological conditions of their time. Chapter 1 articulates a strain of post-Vietnam melancholy that runs through Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and The Informers. Blankness in this chapter is recast as a melancholic withdrawal and as signifying the impasse of the melancholic subject. Arguing for the importance of these earlier texts, which are often viewed by critics as a pre-canonical “Brat Pack” beginning in Ellis’s oeuvre, the chapter works to reveal Ellis’s critique of 1980s neoliberalism and its policies of privatization. While the erasure of the subject is traced, the chapter also makes the case for the emergence of a new subject in The Informers whose composite features are detachment and a lack of “engaged embodied existence.”85 The second chapter looks at American Psycho through the lens of Žižek’s three forms of violence. Above all, it demonstrates how

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the potential instability of American Psycho has not been sufficiently understood. The novel cannot be taken as straightforward satire, as on one level it functions as such, yet on another it is complicit with the power structures it underwrites. Reading the novel through Marcuse’s critique of repressive desublimation and Žižek’s contemporary revision of this concept, the chapter reveals how Ellis underwrites both the systemic violence of global capitalism and the generation of socio-symbolic violence by the Republican ideology of the period. The equivocal nature of violence in the novel questions the initial media criticism that surrounded the novel. Through missing Ellis’s political and ethical critique, the media criticism surrounding the novel itself enacted the violence inherent to the prevailing liberal attitude of Ellis’s critics, which focused on the subjective violence in the novel while ignoring, and thus sustaining, the systemic violence that lies beneath the surface culture. The third chapter moves into the 1990s and reads Glamorama as a complex exposition of what is conceived as the “image fetishism” of the period. Reading Victor through Roger Luckhurst’s trauma theory, the chapter articulates Victor as the amnesiac gapped subject of the spectacle of 1990s image society. Like Patrick Bateman, Victor is trapped in a “symbolic ideological deadlock,”86 but this deadlock now originates from fetishism of the image rather than fetishism of the object. “Spectacle” is defined through Guy Debord’s influential formulation of the situationist spectacle. Indeed, the terrorists have situationist leanings and they are read as cloning the gapped subjects of the fashion world in order to reinstate the enlightened politicized subject. The practice of cloning in the novel is considered against the background of the controversy and debates that the Human Genome Project prompted in the late-1990s. The terrorist acts are viewed in terms of iconoclasm, suggesting that the iconoclast practices of destruction and cloning that the terrorists carry out are a strategy of cultural recuperation through which the icon of the fashion world is replaced with the cultural icon of DNA. Through the narrative of terrorism that runs below Victor’s narrative, Ellis’s novel sharply critiques a culture of body commerce and operates to negate the spectacle of 1990s culture. Chapter 4 and the coda discuss Ellis’s first two novels of the twenty-first century. These novels demonstrate a clear break between the critique of the cultural ideologies of the 1980s and 1990s and a climate of what Žižek terms “post-political bio-politics.”87 This represents that shift between two phases of “cultural capitalism” evident for Žižek in “a shift in the logic of advertising”, that he remarks, is a

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change from a focus on “personal authenticity or quality of experience” in the 1980s and 1990s to the experience of being part of “a larger collective movement”88 in the twenty-first century. Anomalous in Ellis’s oeuvre, Lunar Park marks a break from Ellis’s characteristic use of the present tense to a narrative written in the past tense. Chapter 4 provocatively suggests that Lunar Park’s move into the past tense functions as a mode of representing the denial of the contemporary that took place post-9/11. Ellis’s act of self-parody is integral to his act of underwriting the culture of fear and the climate of border enforcement that arose in the wake of September 11, 2001. Through creating “Bret” out of the media constructs of himself, Ellis parodies the desire of the media for the author’s self-repentance for the horror of American Psycho. In this vein, Bret functions as a paradigm of the becoming real of cultural and media fictions, and, through Bret, this notion is extended to critique 9/11 as a mirror of this paradigm. Through the construct of Bret, Ellis addresses the impact of 9/11 on the bourgeois American subject. In particular, Ellis represents the haunting of the posttraumatic subject through the use of gothic tropes. 9/11, the father, and the author’s own creations form the topology of haunting that takes place in the narrative. The doppelganger split between Bret and “the writer” is revealed as the gothic haunting par excellence of the novel, calling into question what Jean Baudrillard envisaged as the self-censorship of America post-9/11.89 The final chapter offers a reading of Ellis’s novel Imperial Bedrooms as an analog of Less Than Zero. Rather than a direct sequel to Ellis’s first book, Imperial Bedrooms sits uneasily on the borders of sequel and remake—hence my use of the term “coda.” The mirroring of the first chapter by the final chapter corresponds to the reflexive relation of Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero. The coda argues that as a reconstruction of Less Than Zero, Imperial Bedrooms underwrites the politics of reconstruction undertaken by America in the period 2003−2009. The characters in the novel possess the names and the surface identities of the original characters, yet two decades later they stand for America’s corporate and political elite. Drawing on contemporary political and cultural theory, the chapter argues that Ellis’s later work can be read in terms of Less Than Zero as a repeated event and that it becomes the site of an ironizing politics that in its narrative reflexivity works to comment on the contiguity of the neoliberalist politics of the 1980s and the clandestine neoimperialist endeavors of the 2000s. The coda then, through analyzing the novel’s portrayal of a web of corruption and intrigue in the Los Angeles film industry, reveals a complex politics of exploitation and argues that the novel’s

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concerns with the two opposing modalities of exposure and latency, along with the characters’ discursive codes, critiques a political climate of exploitative border relations and uncertainty post-2003, whereby conflicting narratives are also narratives of conflict. In reading Ellis as underwriting the contemporary, this book seeks to move beyond critical works that push Ellis into categories such as postmodernist, sadist, moralist, and satirist by asserting the author’s incommensurability. Many critics have worked on the assumption that Ellis is a straightforward satirist, and others, such as Carl Tighe90 and Julian Murphet,91 have outwardly labeled him as such. This book seeks to argue against any branding of the author, since to brand Ellis is to enact precisely the reduction found in the relation of productions that he is critiquing. The duplicity of the verb to “underwrite” mirrors Ellis’s trickiness. Ellis is cited only once in interview in this book (in chapter 3). The lack of material used from interviews with Ellis is intentional. Ellis plays with truth and fiction in interviews. He is constantly contradicting himself, wearing masks, playing with the media through playing with truth, as he plays with the media’s expectations of him and constructions of him in his novels (Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms being central examples). Critics’ use of material either from interviews with Ellis or from internet resources that claim to be official sites of Ellis’s, which are equally unreliable (Ellis likes to Twitter) have in the past shown his improbity. Murphet, for instance, stated in 2002: “It is most likely that Ellis will continue in the direction marked out by Glamorama with subsequent work (his next novel promises to be set in Washington DC among the political elite).” 92 Ellis’s next published novel was Lunar Park. His critique of the Washington elite was in fact set in Los Angeles and came in 2010 with the publication of Imperial Bedrooms. Ellis’s body of work requires a sustained analysis that moves beyond the tendency to assume that within his novels there is a precise subjective stance. The instability of his work needs to be addressed not as an inadequacy but as a mode of resistance to the contemporary cultural and political climates in which his books function. Ellis’s work is continually challenging. This book suggests that reading Ellis’s work as at once destabilizing the culture in which he operates by writing below it, while taking responsibility for the modes of objective violence inherent in the very way in which we live, opens up new avenues of perceiving and understanding our contemporary world and the function of the writer within it.

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CH A P T ER

1

Missing Persons: Melancholy as Symptom in Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and The Informers

Ellis and the Market Ellis entered the literary marketplace in 1985 with the publication of his first novel Less Than Zero. The public saw his arrival as more of a gate crashing of the literary establishment by another member of the “literary Brat Pack,” a pop culture brand created by The Village Voice in 1987, that Ellis laconically defines in Lunar Park as “essentially a media-made package: all fake flash and punk and menace” (LP, 8). The media objectification of Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tama Janowitz ironically mirrored in reality the reification of the human subject into celebrity culture that preoccupies much of Ellis’s fiction. He parodies his status as a young celebrity author in Lunar Park: [I]f you were not a supporter of the Brat Pack, you simply had to accept us anyway. We were everywhere. There was no escaping our visages staring out at you from the pages of magazines and TV talk shows and scotch ads and posters on the sides of buses, in the tabloid gossip columns, our blank expression caught in the dead glare of the camera flash, a hand holding a cigarette a fan was lighting. We had invaded the world. (LP, 9)

In this later self-reflexive work, Ellis ironically critiques the branding of these writers that took place in the 1980s. The subsequent critical reception of these authors during the 1980s and 1990s in part reflected the initial media promotion of them. For James Annesley, Elizabeth Young, and Graham Caveney, the novels of the Brat Pack

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authors were primers of a culture in which consumerism had run out of control. The authors themselves, for these critics, were part of a “lost” generation who were branded “X” for want of a better nonsignifier. In their critical reading of “Generation X,” Young and Caveney stressed the “interminable contradictions of a mediatized consumer society”1 and read Ellis’s novels in terms of self-destruction amid the excessive consumption of sex, fashion and narcotics. As a result of this critical reception, Ellis’s first novel emerges as a product of consumer culture and one that is inextricable from mass culture. Graham Caveney offers a psycho-geographical reading, arguing that the novel’s fragmented settings of parties, clubs, and cafés are settings linked only by car journeys, rather than “any real sense of place.” Caveney agrees with Elizabeth Young that the geographical “spatial blankness” acts as a mirror that reflects “the subject’s ethical emptiness.”2 Such early criticism of Ellis’s work is valuable, in part, because it documents the critical phase that witnessed postmodernism at its apogee, with its giddying interpretations of the text’s fragmentation, which all too often paid a heavy debt to Baudrillard’s hugely influential America (1980).3 Thus the subject’s disappearance in the novels was frequently read as the disappearance of the subject into the hyperreality of Baudrillard’s America. James Annesley, however, in his seminal study, Blank Fictions admirably breaks away from “the slippery categories of postmodernism” and understands that “a focus on the category of the commodity provides a way of interpreting blank fiction in terms that combine a strong sense of the significance of both period and place with a wider perspective on contemporary capitalist structures.”4 He claims that the mass-cultural reference points in Less Than Zero do not signal the banality and weightlessness of the novel but rather “elements that root the text to a precise material situation.”5 From its inception, then, Ellis’s writing has been reified into the mass-cultural space of late capitalism. The early public and critical responses to the work facilitated the author’s strategy of double-voicing, providing the surface narrative that he was to increasingly underwrite. The more recent critical attention paid to Ellis by scholars such as Berthold Schoene, Naomi Mandel, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Carla Freccero, and Marco Abel, has established Ellis as a canonical writer and has done much to undermine the branding of Ellis as a Brat Pack writer that I argue can now be discarded. Such studies tend to focus on the work perceived as Ellis’s canonical novels, American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park, relegating his early work to precanonical status, a kind of Brat Pack beginning. The exception to this process

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of canonizing is Julian Murphet’s valuable study Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001), which provides a plenary analysis of the literature of Los Angeles through a framework of demography and critical and spatial theory. The dominant critical trajectory, while correctly acknowledging Ellis’s novels as gaining complexity and maturity as his oeuvre develops, is somewhat problematic. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and The Informers should be grouped together, and indeed, within the larger trajectory of Ellis’s work, the novels do lack a certain narrative complexity that Ellis’s longer works accomplish. However, they also form an important part of Ellis’s body of work.

Melancholy: The Novel as Symptom The melancholy present in the novels Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and The Informers, is a portent of what Andrew Gibson has termed the “cultural pathology”6 of the decade to follow. Melancholy is related to the loss of subjectivity in these first novels and is a result of the systemic violence of neoliberalism. At the same time that this loss occurs, fear is registered as a cultural component produced through the subjects’ alienation from social space. The politics of disappearance and the politics of fear converge in these novels to evince the subjective withdrawal that took place under the surface of American society in the 1980s. The subjects (termed as such because they lack depth of character) of the early novels typify Adorno’s idea of the vanishing subject7 in an earlier stage of reification than Patrick Bateman and Victor Ward. This chapter addresses the novels Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction through a political and philosophical lens in order to trace a condition of melancholy, which in The Informers, emerges as a new form of posttraumatic subjectivity. Ellis wrote the narratives of The Informers over a ten-year period, from 1983 to 1994. The subjects’ indifference in The Informers is read in this chapter as evidence of what Žižek perceives to be a new subject that emerges that “survives its own death, the death (or erasure) of its symbolic identity.”8 While Žižek locates this subject as primarily a twenty-first century phenomenon, the emergence of this subject can clearly be traced in the narratives of The Informers. This new subject, Žižek claims, exhibits familiar features, “a lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference and detachment—it is a subject who is no longer ‘in-the-world’ in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence.” 9 Adorno articulated the problem of subjectivity in his dedication to Max Horkheimer at the outset of Minima Moralia (1951). For

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Adorno in 1951, considerations that have their origins in the subject had become erroneous because, he wrote, “the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one.” “Individual experience,” Adorno states, “necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself.”10 Adorno was writing about a culture in which “[t]he subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself.”11 To read Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction is to enter this narrative of the dissolving subject in the final stages of its dissolution. The loss of subjectivity is tied to the notion that the past is historically condemned. Read with hindsight, the dislocation of the subjects in Ellis’s early fiction invites an unnerving comparison with Ellis’s later post-9/11 novel, Lunar Park. The subjects of the early novels, part of the generation born in the late sixties, are affected by postVietnam trauma combined with a cultural denial of the past. As a consequence, they are afflicted by an ontological nullity that in Ellis’s world succeeds in reducing subjectivity to the point of erasure. Ellis registers the geopolitical climate of his novels at the start of his second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), through a citation from Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato (1975): The facts, even when beaded on a chain, still did not have real order. Events did not flow. The facts were separate and haphazard and random even as they happened, episodic, broken, no smooth transitions, no sense of events unfolding from prior events.12

By opening The Rules of Attraction with this citation from O’Brien, Ellis directly associates the fragmentation of his text with the cultural fallout of the Vietnam War. O’Brien’s words clearly ground Ellis’s own episodic and broken narrative, which starts in the middle of a sentence, within a historical context. That very historical context foregrounds a historical amnesia within the subject and thus paradoxically situates the subject within an ahistorical context. The idea that post-Vietnam America suffered from cultural melancholy has been well documented and heavily theorized. Andrew Delbanco’s William E. Massey lectures, collected in a volume titled The Real American Dream (1998), drew on Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in 1842 that within America there was “a strange melancholy in the midst of abundance.”13 In 1998, Delbanco stated that

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“today hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone.”14 Delbanco’s lectures articulate the social climate after the Vietnam War, yet they tend to fall prey to the tendency Andrew Gibson identifies in critics to take for granted “a self-evidently self-justifying world of praxis, from which melancholy is a feeble declension.”15 Gibson’s own essay, titled “Oublier Baudrillard” (2003), seeks to evoke a strain of melancholy emergent in the legacy of the nineties that he calls “melancholy of the year 2000.”16 Gibson’s reflections, however, are also relevant to the melancholy found in Ellis’s three early novels. Reflecting on Freud’s account of melancholia in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Gibson reveals the restrictions of the Freudian account of melancholia for the nineties. The limitations of Freud’s account for the twenty-first century, Gibson declares, reside in the fact that, for Freud, melancholia has no explicit social, cultural, or political dimension. Gibson suggests that Adorno might be a better source to turn to, as, in Minima Moralia, melancholy is “precisely a question of political and cultural disaster.”17 The Freudian melancholic logic, he argues, is similar to Adorno’s in that it “involves a failure of love” in which “life will no longer be known in its immediacy.” However, in Adorno’s account of melancholia, Gibson remarks, “it is social conditions that prevent the objective realisation of happiness or closeness.”18 Adorno’s emphasis on the responsibility of social conditions for the failure of the subject to realize happiness or intimacy provides a theoretical context that not only illuminates but is crucial for an understanding of Ellis’s early novels, as well as the forms of violence that the social conditions of each decade inflict upon the subject across his body of work. The early critical approach to the novels tends to occlude potential philosophical readings of Ellis’s fiction in favor of specifically postmodernist concerns. The exception to this is Nicki Sahlin’s study that looks at Ellis’s work in relation to existentialism.19 Quite rightly Sahlin remarks of Less Than Zero, “[t]he novel is as much ‘about’ Hollywood as Heart of Darkness is ‘about’ Africa or The Stranger is ‘about’ Algeria.”20 Yet the assumption underlying existentialism is that the subjects exist in a state of freedom. Implicit in my argument is that the subjects of Ellis’s novels are not free subjects. Ellis’s early novels have been viewed largely in the context of postmodernist critic Fredric Jameson and his seminal study Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). To understand Ellis’s practice of underwriting, his earlier work needs to be set in the context of postmodernism’s twin political context of neoliberalism.

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David Harvey draws an important distinction between the movement of 1968 and the social climate of the 1980s. Harvey considers the Vietnam War to be “the most obvious catalyst for discontent”21 in the 1970s. In addition to the Vietnam War, Harvey recognizes that “the destructive activities of corporations and the state in relation to the environment, the push towards mindless consumerism, the failure to address social issues and respond adequately to diversity, as well as intense restrictions on individual possibilities and personal behaviours by state-mandated and ‘traditional’ controls were also widely resented.”22 In the 1970s’ rhetoric of social justice, the interventionist state was the enemy and demanded reform. Capitalism was also seen as an enemy. Hence, Harvey points out, the radicalism of the 1970s posed a “threat to capitalist class power.” The neoliberalist policies of privatization and deregulation, espoused by Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., signaled a break from the interventionist state. In a neoliberalist climate, Harvey explains, “[b]y capturing ideals of individual freedom and turning them against the interventionist and regulatory practices of the state, capitalist class interests could hope to protect and even restore their position.”23 Ideologically, this was a suitable task for neoliberalism. Yet, Harvey observes, neoliberalism needed “to be backed up by a practical strategy that emphasized the liberty of consumer choice, not only with respect to particular products but also with respect to lifestyles, modes of expression and a wide range of cultural practices.” The process of neoliberalization demanded the construction of a “neo-liberal market-based popular culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism.”24 In this respect, Harvey observes that neoliberalism was deeply compatible with the cultural momentum of postmodernism. With the compatible climate of neoliberalism, postmodernism “could now emerge full-blown as both a cultural and intellectual dominant.” This, Harvey argues, “was the challenge that corporations and class elites set out to finesse in the 1980s.”25 As Gibson remarks, for Pierre Bourdieu, it was precisely a state of melancholy that constituted “unexpressed and often inexpressible malaises”26 unarticulated in the political, social, and intellectual discourses that arose in contrast to the “tutelary fiction” of neoliberalism. This “tutelary fiction” Gibson explains as “the insistence that, appropriately regulated, the economic mode of existence could itself produce a pure and perfect order.”27 This form of melancholic logic is at work in Ellis’s novels and the recognition of this “tutelary fiction” transpires as an integral part of Ellis’s method of underwriting.

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To understand the melancholy of Ellis’s early novels is to rescue Ellis’s works from the notion of “blank fiction” and to recast them as a group of works that in fact enact a negative withdrawal in the relations of production. In his work on narrative theory, Gibson repeatedly posits a modern ethics as what is at stake in the (modern) novel. Thus, commenting on the narrative representation of the Badiouian event, by which Gibson means “the random occurrence of the new in Being,”28 he states, “[t]he event is the occasion of the transformation of forms, the transformation of the world.”29 Reading Madame Bovary in terms of the event, he understands that, for Flaubert, in the depressed years after the failure of 1848 revolutions: “The world must be remorsely documented in its full negativity in order that the imperative of the event appear in contrast.”30 Ellis’s novels can also be viewed in the manner Gibson interprets Flaubert. In his depictions of the melancholic suspension of the subjects, in a state in which they experience what Richard Burton defines as “[f]ear and sorrow without a cause,”31 the melancholic condition functions dialectically, as a refusal of the culture that has precipitated it. Just as Badiou views Mallarmé as turning in disgust from the self-satisfaction of “a society gorging on its own pieties,”32 so Ellis, in his early novels, can be seen as turning away from a culture that has lost its value to the overriding forces of 1980s materialism. An early monologue in The Rules of Attraction points to the way in which Ellis is underwriting both the neoliberalist and the postmodern turn in the 1980s. Sean Bateman is in Marc’s room. Marc is shooting up heroin and explaining to Sean where it all went wrong: “The Kennedys, man, screwed it . . . up . . . Actually it was J . . . F . . . K . . . John F. Kennedy did it . . . He screwed it up . . . all up, you see . . .” He licks his lips now, continues, “There was this . . . our mothers were pregnant with us when we . . . I mean, he . . . was blown away in ‘64 and that whole incident . . . screwedthingsup . . .” He stops, then goes on. “ . . . in a really heavy duty way . . .” Special emphasis on “heavy” and “duty.” “And . . . in turn . . . you see, it jolted us in a really heavy duty way when we . . . were . . . in . . .” He stops again, looks at his arm and then at me. “Whatchamacallit . . .” Looks back at his arm and then at me, then at the arm again, concentrating as he pulls the needle out, then at me, still confused. “Their . . . um, primordial wombs, and, so, that is why we are . . . me, you, the narc across the hall, the sister in Booth, all the way we are . . . Do you . . . understand? . . . Is this clear?” He squints up at me. “Jesus . . . think if you had a brother who was born in ‘69 or something . . . They’d be . . . fucking bonkers . . . ” (ROA, 24)

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The identification of Marc with the trauma of 1963 is evident in his linguistic slippage that confuses the “we” of his, then unborn, generation as being blown away in Kennedy’s assassination (which Marc mistakenly understands to have taken place in 1964). The rhetorical texture of Marc’s speech signals trauma. Roger Luckhurst, in his important work, The Trauma Question (2008), comments that Robert Eaglestone’s explication of the features of the genre of Holocaust testimony is a formula that functions to outline “a general trauma aesthetic.”33 As Luckhurst remarks, for Eaglestone, “interruptions, temporal disorder, refusal of easy readerly identification, disarming play with narrative framework, disjunct movements in style, tense, focalization or discourse, and a resistance to closure that is demonstrated in compulsive telling and retelling,”34 are narrative markers of the trauma testimony. Marc’s disjointed speech, which he says “really slowly,” comes across as a trauma narrative both stylistically and in terms of the content. Marc’s attempt, and ultimate failure, to enunciate why he and his friends are “the way we are” gestures toward the idea, that arrived in 1980, that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was a sociopolitical category.35 His emphasis on the words “heavy” and “duty,” his repetition and lapses into ellipsis signal Marc’s condition to be linked to the post-Vietnam syndrome and the unexpatiated guilt of his country. This disorder is also tied to the traumatic emergence of the new postmodern culture. Sean comments that while Marc’s discourse is distressing and incomprehensible (“a lot of it,” he reports, “I can’t even listen to”), Marc’s room embodies a series of cultural references that offer Sean a comforting “familiarity.” “[T]he ripped Bob Dylan Poster for Don’t Look Back, the stills from Easy Rider, ‘Born to be Wild’ always coming from the stereo (or Hendrix or Eric Burdon and The Animals or Iron Butterfly or Zep)” and the copy of an old Pablo Neruda book are references to the culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. The references point to a period in which, Harvey states, students embraced “the Berkeley ‘free speech’ movement of the 1960s or . . . took to the streets in Paris, Berlin and Bangkok and were so mercilessly shot down in Mexico City shortly before the 1968 Olympic Games.” These students “demanded freedom from parental, educational, corporate, bureaucratic and state constraints”36 but social justice was their “primary political objective.”37 The cultural references draw a sharp contrast between the 1960s and 1970s, and the desublimated culture of the 1980s in which the students are now trapped. In particular, the allusion to the socialist hope of Pablo Neruda, the pseudonym of the Chilean communist writer and politician Neftalí

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Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, jars with the climate of the neoliberalist Reagan years. Neruda, a close collaborator and friend of Salvador Allende, took his name from the politically active Czech poet Jan Neruda (1834−1891). The reference is also a textual clue from Ellis. Jan Neruda was known for his satirical representations of the petty bourgeois of Prague. Pablo Neruda wrote everything in green ink to signify the color of “esperanza,” the color of hope. In Marc’s room, such markers are ironic. Sean says in reported speech, “Marc’s leaving soon, any day now, can’t stand the scene.” Ann Arbor, with its history of left-wing activism, “is where it’s at” (ROA, 25). In the same monologue, Sean mentions that he goes over to Roxanne’s place. She tells him that The Carousel is closing down “due to shitty business,” which Sean says depressed him. A marker of the closing down of cultural spaces, The Carousel recalls the New Orleans Carousel Bar, frequented by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote, among others. A literary space indicating an eminent tradition in American letters, The Carousel appears in Hemingway’s story “Night Before Battle” (1939) and Williams’s plays, The Rose Tattoo (1955) and Orpheus Descending (1957). Ellis also alludes to a similar contraction of the historically rich spaces of the film industry. In the tenth monologue of The Informers, the narrator comments that the historic Los Angeles movie house La Reina, built in 1938, is going to shut down. Purchased by the large chain Mann Theatres, La Reina was sold to developers. In 1987, it was turned into a shopping mall. Such references in Ellis’s novels signify the violence that corporations inflicted on the American cultural landscape in the 1980s. Bourdieu states that the “progressive disappearance of the autonomous worlds of cultural production, cinema, publishing, etc., and therefore, ultimately products themselves” is an immediate effect of “the implementation of the great neo-liberal utopia.”38 In Ellis’s novels, the elimination of modernist cultural spaces and the consequent paring down of American culture (in Less Than Zero, Blair has the CliffsNotes to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a desublimated replacement of the original) are part of the subjects’ melancholic condition. The Rules of Attraction has often been dismissed as Ellis’s weakest novel, reduced to a campus novel about sex, drugs, and the death of rock ‘n’ roll. Rather, when read closely with full attention to the occurrence of the references that are not referring to pop culture but to the culture that came before, a plaintive novel appears that can be read as mourning the losses of literary and cultural tradition suffered by 1980s culture.

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Code Unknown “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles” (LTZ, 1). Clay’s opening statement reveals not only his antagonistic relationship to the exterior world but a wider concern that stretches out across Ellis’s whole oeuvre. “Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me,” Clay informs the reader regarding the fragment from Blair’s utterance, “it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time.” Compared to this fear of social integration, for Clay, “Nothing else seems to matter.” Karl Marx proposed that: “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.39 Viewed against Marx’s claim, Clay’s opening observation establishes a social environment perceived as hostile to the individual and points to a relationship of antinomy between man and his social space. Against this phrase, nothing else matters for Clay: “Not the fact that I am eighteen and it’s December . . . Not the mud that had splattered the legs of my jeans . . . Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear . . . ” (LTZ, 1). From the moment that the novel opens, the narrator is distanced from both the reader and his own narrative. The use of negative anaphora provides a description of Clay, yet through it Clay positions himself not in relation to the details about himself but to the dislocated sentence that appears in his mind. The universal nature of the phrase succeeds in suppressing the less digestible particulars of Clay’s life: “It seems easier,” he claims, “to hear people are afraid to merge rather than ‘I’m pretty sure Muriel’s anorexic’ or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves.” Clay’s opening preoccupation with the statement shows a troubling inability in Clay to merge with the exterior world. Despite the apparent social alienation inherent to the phrase, a signal to the reader from Ellis, Clay finds recuperation in the phrase’s objectivity, which functions to shield him from the unsettling reality of his subjective life. The failure of Clay to merge with the exterior world also anticipates his failure to narrate. The short circuit between subjective and objective at the start of his narrative points to this failure. Clay’s negligent minimalist prose testifies to his melancholic state. As Gibson points out, the temporality of melancholy produces a “strange suspension of animation”40 and this flatness is registered in the minimalism of Clay’s narrative. Julian Murphet has commented on the stylistic similarities between Joan Didion and Ellis, seeing Ellis as continuing “Didion’s ongoing concern, in fiction and non-fiction alike, with the

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flattening of human subjectivity, the ambience of ‘non-places’ such as highways, hotel rooms, lobbies and airports, the erasure of ethics in society, and above all the stripping away of ostentation from her prose style.”41 Murphet’s description of the “blank, unaffected, cool, and ‘non-literary’ ”42 style of Clay’s narration is accurate, but this minimalism can also be read as a symptom of melancholy. Rather than Murphet’s contention that “Ellis refuses to give the reader pleasure through stylistic grace,”43 I view Ellis as withdrawing these stylistic elements in order to elicit the “suspension of animation” that Gibson attributes to the melancholic condition. Didion outlined a similar failure to narrate almost two decades earlier in her essay “The White Album.” During the period 1966 to 1971, Didion reports that she experienced what she describes as a common condition, doubting the premises of all the stories she had ever told herself. Despite appearing as “a competent enough member of some community or another . . . a citizen,”44 Didion recalls that she began her replies to correspondence in this period with the words: “During my absence from the country these last eighteen months.” Isolating the problem as a lack of reference she explains: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no meaning beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting room experience.45

In a “flash cut,” printed in italics (a technique Ellis also uses to denote the flashbacks in Clay’s narrative), Didion provides her psychiatric report for the summer of 1968. Among other symptoms, the report documents that “basic reality contact is obviously and seriously impaired at times” in the patient, along with “a fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic and depressive view of the world around her.” Didion’s despondency, her feeling that “all human effort is foredoomed to failure,” is a conviction that the psychiatric analysis concludes “seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal.”46 It is this state of passive withdrawal that Didion refers to as her absence from the country. In Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and The Informers, the condition that started in America around 1968, which Didion’s psychiatric report documents, has developed into a critical cultural disorder in which the subject no longer has any meaningful cultural referents. The inability of Didion and Clay to construct a narrative reflects, to use Fredric Jameson’s somewhat critically exhausted term,

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a lack of “cognitive mapping.” Recontextualizing the term with regard to the Paris riots of 2005, Slavoj Žižek has recently neatly reworded Jameson’s notion as the subjects’ “inability to locate the experience of their situation within a meaningful whole.”47 Throughout the three early novels, the characters attempt to find a historical referent but fail. This is shown in the following dialogue between Daniel and Clay: “I want to go back,” Daniel says, quietly, without effort. “Where?” I ask, unsure. There’s a long pause which kind of freaks me out and Daniel finishes his drink and fingers his sunglasses he’s still wearing and says, “I don’t know, just back.” (LTZ, 3)

Daniel’s pause is important here, as is Clay’s reaction to it. The pause in Daniel’s narration, which usually denotes thinking and reflection, produces nothing due to his lack of cultural memory. Moreover, Clay’s fear of this pause points to a fear of the subject’s historical dislocation and consequent sense of invisibility. The Costello song from which Less Than Zero gets its title ends with the words, to “talk about the future now we’ve put the past away.” Pamela Thurschwell’s informative and exhaustive analysis of Elvis Costello as a cultural icon and a cultural critic in the novel, interprets the song as suggesting that the “amnesiac future of the commodity is an ahistorical, amoral one.”48 Thurschwell’s analysis is acute, and the subject’s melancholy can be situated in relation to this depthless future as a symptom of the commodity fetishism and image fetishism in Ellis’s subsequent novels. Clay’s reaction to Daniel shows that his lack of a historical framework, that which Axel Honneth identifies as the lack of or denial of “antecedent recognition”49 signified by reification, is a source of anxiety for the contemporary subject, and it is an anxiety that pervades these three novels. This suspension in ahistorical temporality explains the way in which the characters are lost in a subjective sense and missing in a wider objective sense. Murphet has argued that some less “overtly political concept than Jameson’s ‘cognitive mapping’ seems in order” to account for what he sees as “a reduced cognitive charge” in Los Angeles literature today (Murphet points out that Jameson’s concept was in fact simply a dusted-off version of Lukács’s notion of class consciousness). This is a sharp observation, which justifies Murphet’s turn to the “more ethnographic” concept of Bakhtin’s chronotope “as a better instrument for the calibration of literary texts as mediators

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of the spatial.”50 However, I suggest that Ellis’s early novels possess a greater political dimension than critics have tended to give them credit for, and through the blank aesthetic, conflate the literary and the political. Žižek’s recontextualizing of Jameson’s worn notion within the context of the 2005 Paris riots provides a greater understanding of the subjects’ melancholic absence in the novels. Žižek asserts that the lack of cognitive mapping signaled by the riots exhibited the fact that the protestors “found themselves on the other side of the wall which separates the visible from the invisible part of the republican social space.”51 Of course, Ellis’s subjects are not rendered invisible by French republican universalism but by a wider objective social totality. The lack of mapping is both a social and temporal dislocation, and it threatens their visibility in terms of their self-experience. The novels reveal the social, political, and philosophical monadic state of the subject in 1980s American society. Adorno placed responsibility for the decay of individuality and what he saw as the “crisis of society” on society, whereas reactionary critics placed “ontological responsibility for this on the individual,” accusing the individual of causing their own shallowness, lack of faith and substance. The “mechanical emptiness” and “neurotic weakness” that, Adorno observes, individualists such as Aldous Huxley and Karl Jaspers condemn in the individual are indeed true of Ellis’s subjects. Yet Ellis adopts the position Adorno took and reveals his subjects to be in a system, which, in Adorno’s terms, is “not only encompassing and deforming them, but even reaching down into that humanity which once conditioned them as individuals.”52 Throughout Ellis’s body of work, it is the social system that inflicts violence upon the individual, and his unveiling of these hidden forces is a vital part of his process of underwriting. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and The Informers document the regression of the individual, who is made “impoverished and coarsened” by the dissolution of all the mediating elements within himself, to what Adorno conceived as “the state of a mere social subject.”53 Ellis highlights the isolation of the subjects narratologically through his use of the monologue, trapping the reader within the confines of his first-person narratives. The monologue, by virtue of its single voice, becomes symptomatic of the subject’s state of detachment, textually realizing the subjects’ cognitive cartography that alienates them from a wider global world. The Rules of Attraction and The Informers further this alienation by being composed of a collection of multiple monologues. The Rules of Attraction, a series of monologues narrated by Camden students, institutes proper

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names at the outset of each narrative, providing the reader with an interpellative signal at the beginning of each episode. Yet in terms of the Althusserian notion that it is through the proper name that the subject is ideologically constituted,54 the subjects are in fact interpellated as blanks. The expectation of further character development following the name is frustrated by the novel merely constituting a series of narrative voices that are indistinguishable apart from the fact of these referents. Thus the series of named monologues serves to emphasize the emptiness of the subject and simultaneously allude to the surface nature of the culture by affording the subject the interpellative force yet denying character development. The Informers, by contrast, is a congeries of thirteen monologues by characters inhabiting a shared social space, which has a similar narrative structure but without the referents. The monologues of the Los Angeles subjects in The Informers are anonymous and the reader is unaware which character is speaking until they are addressed by another character. However, it becomes apparent to the reader that the name of each narrator is not important, precisely because the name has no function in a narrative space in which the subjects have experienced what Adorno termed “depersonalization,” “the bourgeois devaluation of the individual.”55 That the depersonalized subjects cannot connect to their exterior world or to one another on any kind of psychologically intimate level ruptures the dialogic relations in the text and testifies to the lack of social relations between the subjects within their apparent social collective. This narratological isolation and the subjects’ condition of melancholy are perpetrated by the failure of what the structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson called the “phatic function.” The phatic function for Jakobson is the function related to contact in verbal communication by which the channel for communication is cleared by an utterance from the addresser to the addressee. Slavoj Žižek comments on the political relevance of this “emptiness of contact”: “The emptiness of contact has a propitious technical function as a test of the system itself: a ‘Hello do you hear me?’ ” For Žižek, the phatic function is close to the “meta-linguistic” function: “[I]t checks whether the system is working.” At the same time, he adds, “the addresser and addressee check whether they are using the same code . . . a testing of both the channel and the code itself.”56 The capacity of Ellis to underwrite the social space of the novel resides in his registering the failure of the system through phatic failure. The failure of the phatic function in the novels is complex. It indicates both the collapse of social relations between subjects and

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the lack of cultural interpellation afforded the subject. Žižek notes that Jakobson’s analysis also considered the means of discontinuing communication: “[T]he mere purport of prolonging communicative contact suggests the emptiness of such contact.”57 The conversation between Clay and Kim in Less Than Zero is exemplary of this: “What have you been doing?” I ask. “What have you been doing?” She asks back. I don’t say anything. She looks up bewildered. “Come on, Clay, tell me.” She looks through the pile of clothes. “You must do something.” “Oh, I don’t know.” “What do you do?” She asks. “Things, I guess.” I sit on the mattress. “Like what?” “I don’t know. Things.” My voice breaks and I think about the Coyote and I think that I’m going to cry, but it passes and I just want to get my vest and get out of here. (LTZ, 137)

The dialogue begins with a simple question to open the line of communication, “What have you been doing?” However, the addressee blocks this gesture by reflecting back the question. Clay’s subsequent communicatory refusal has the effect of transforming Kim’s communicatory gestures into an interrogation, and the question is altered during this process from “What have you been doing?” to “What do you do?” The simple phatic question in such dialogues, precisely because of the character’s failure to respond, assumes an ontological dimension. The effect on Clay is to elicit anxiety, expressed in his monologue by a wave in which his voice momentarily breaks, the image of the Coyote enters his head, and he feels as if he is going to cry. Yet this moment of affect, induced by a dislocated image of a symbol of North America, passes, and he responds to Kim’s question with another question. When he looks to the external social space, he encounters the disordered alphabet written on Kim’s wall, which reflects back to him his own inability to articulate himself in language. The jumbled letters perform a phatic block similar to Kim’s initial reflective question to him. A reversal occurs in the dialogue, in which Clay now becomes the interrogator as he ignores Kim’s repetition of the question “What do you do?” Muriel’s scream at the end of the dialogue functions as a nonverbal expressive interjection that signals the horror of the subjects’ lack of communication. At other times in Less Than Zero, the malfunction of communication elicits linguistic encounters that operate as dialogic mirrors. This

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is evident in parts of Clay and Kim’s dialogue and also in one of the opening conversations between Clay, Alana, and Daniel. At Blair’s party, Clay introduces Alana to Daniel: “You look just like David Bowie,” Alana, who is obviously coked out of her mind, tells Daniel. “Are you left-handed?” “No, I’m afraid not,” Daniel says. “Alana likes guys who are left-handed,” I tell Daniel. “And who look like David Bowie,” she reminds me. “And who live in the Colony,” I finish. “Oh, Clay, you’re such a beasty,” she giggles. “Clay is a total beasty,” she tells Daniel. “Yes, I know,” Daniel says. “A beasty. Totally.” (LTZ, 8)

Here, the characters’ code of communication malfunctions, as their responses become tautological inflections of the former speaker’s lines. This alienating reflective discourse suggests how language itself is trapped within the social space, as in this conversation, where the three characters’ words are merely recycled. The failure of the code in The Rules of Attraction intensifies to the point that the subjects’ utterances at times simply echo the final word of the addresser’s previous statement. For instance, when Franklin asks Lauren “ ‘Are you high?’ ” her response is simply “ ‘High’ ” (ROA, 128). At dinner, Paul’s mother tells him, “I think I want the next car to be blue. A dark blue.” When she asks her son what he thinks, Paul simply replies, “Blue” (ROA, 171). These instances that highlight the absence in relations reveal the means by which the subject is isolated. The addresser has no listener; instead, the primary means of communication has been reduced to an echo. The deep disconnection in relations is shown perhaps most clearly in Anne’s letters. Anne, in her letters from Los Angeles to Sean Bateman in Camden, begins by expressing a failure to write about Los Angeles that echoes Clay and Didion: “I know I should write about this place but I can’t come out with a coherent story. I don’t have a firm enough grasp or base to write from.” She writes at the outset of the correspondence in September 1983: “There’s really not a whole lot to assimilate or see” (I, 138). Anne’s inability to assimilate the environment she is living in suggests the deep disconnection between subject and social space. And when Anne reaches out in an act of communication to another subject, she experiences a correlative schism. Sean never responds to her letters. He doesn’t answer or return them. They seemingly just disappear. Anne’s epistolary turn as a gesture of communication, the narrative of which

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makes up a whole chapter, abstracts Anne’s voice from her external environment but offers no recipient. The act of communication is not directed to the reader, and Anne’s letter writing suggests the voice of a subject speaking into an unknown malevolent space. This space can be characterized as the narrative space of elision. In a pincer movement of alienation from the impenetrable social space and the absent other subject, Anne’s monologue becomes inert. Over the four-month period, her letters trace the inability of the subject to assimilate the exterior space of Los Angeles, yet they also map the assimilation of Anne into this Los Angeles space. Accompanying the appropriation of Anne is the shift in narrative tone to melancholic blankness. The well-structured informative sentences of her initial letters to Sean give way to either incomplete short sentences (“Jesus Christ.”) or long rambling sentences that communicate the fact that she no longer wants to read or write, she just wants “to pour out her thoughts” (I, 146). Rather than a stream of creativity, then, Anne’s writing technique discloses a desire simply to empty her mind, to rid herself of her thoughts. She recognizes this in her penultimate letter to Sean: “I seem to be incapable of writing a newsy letter. Descriptions bore me, I guess, and the best I can do are these scribbles, which may not make much sense to you” (I, 149). Anne’s communicative impotence can be read as a melancholic turn, which is directly related to her absorption into the culture of Los Angeles in which any critical reflection or self-reflection by the subject recedes. The sigh that Kim finally emits in her discourse with Clay is an expression of emotion, yet Clay’s unconcerned response is to simply walk out. Clay’s dismissive response is one of many instances in Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and The Informers that indicates a central problem in social relations that occurs as a result of what Žižek sees as the late-capitalist mode of narcissistic subjectivity “which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential ‘harassments.’ ”58 For example, the narrator of the fifth monologue of The Informers speaks to her mother on the phone. Her mother’s response to her is indifferent and full of elliptical pauses. While she’s on the phone, a boy from Venezuela walks past whom she has seen on the train to Los Angeles. He sees her and smiles, but she reports, “[w]hen he sees that I’m crying he gets scared and moves quickly away” (I, 80). After Lauren has her abortion in The Rules of Attraction, her name signals her narrative, yet a blank page follows (ROA, 309). These instances point to the demise of both the sensory and the cognitive and the expressive apparatus with which the subjects engage with the world.

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The subjects in Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and The Informers are archetypes of Adorno’s “contemporary types,” afflicted by repressive conditions, “in whom any Ego is absent.” Consequently, Adorno states, “they do not act unconsciously in the proper meaning of this term, but simply mirror objective features. Together, they participate in this senseless ritual, following the compulsive rhythm of repetition, and grow poor affectively.”59 Viewed in this way, the novels are fundamental to an understanding of Ellis’s body of work, and they inform his subsequent texts American Psycho and Glamorama as they exhibit the subjects before their complete reification into the ideological apparatus. Remarking on the process of the reduction of cultural values at the outset of Dialectic Of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno explain that the “insensitive liquidation of metaphysics” that occurs with the increase in materialism would be irrelevant if it were not for the fact that in the social whole material artefacts of culture (such as the sports car or expensive clothing) “themselves become a metaphysics, an ideological curtain behind which the real evil is concentrated.”60 Patrick Bateman indicates this state in an extreme form. This new metaphysics produces the conditions under which the oppressive social condition of repressive desublimation flourishes. Trapped in a hostile social space, in Less Than Zero, the alienating effects of a desublimated culture are shown in the characters’ response to Christmas. When Clay arrives home from Camden at the start of the novel, he finds an invitation to Blair’s Christmas party that reads “Fuck Christmas.” On the inside it reads: “Let’s fuck Christmas together” (LTZ, 3). Blair’s lack of concern for the tradition of Christmas is paralleled in the social representation of Christmas. In Du-Pars, Clay describes a Christmas display: “A plastic, neon-lit Santa Claus is holding a three-foot-long Styrofoam candy cane and there are all these large green and red boxes leaning against it and I wonder if there is anything inside the boxes” (LTZ, 18). Here Clay’s reaction is to look beyond the commodity object to the possibility of something within. Yet what the boxes offer, as he apprehends, is emptiness. Clay is confronted in this encounter with Žižek’s notion of the reduction of “the organic whole of experience to an appendix to the ‘dead’ symbolic classification.”61 The empty symbol of Christmas here afflicts the narrator’s mind, and his hermeneutic desire is refused by the fact that what he sees is merely a display. In this encounter, Clay shows the symptoms of what Žižek theorizes in Lacanian terms as a problematic “relation of exteriority”62 to the symbolic chain. The paradox of Clay’s relationship to his social space

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is his understanding of the insubstantiality of that space while simultaneously being bound to it. The effect on Clay of this encounter with the display boxes is a momentary experience of complete absence. Having studied the boxes, he notices a man staring at him: Eyes suddenly focus in on the eyes of a small, dark, intense-looking guy wearing a Universal Studios T-shirt sitting two booths across from me. He’s staring at me and I look down and take a drag, a deep one, off the cigarette. The man keeps staring at me and all I can think is either he doesn’t see me or I’m not here. I don’t know why I think that. (LTZ, 18)

Clay here internalizes the lack of hermeneutic fulfillment that he experiences in the Christmas display in his response to the man’s look. There is a clear mismatch between Clay’s expectation of specular reflection and the man’s failure to provide this. The first reaction Clay has is to think that the man is unable to see him, assuming ocular failure on the stranger’s behalf. The second possibility that Clay thinks about here is that he is absent. This absence is directly linked to the ocular presence of the other and points to a fear of disappearance and, simultaneously, a feeling of ontological nullity. Here Clay indicates the other side of the narcissistic sensibility that derives satisfaction from being, in Martin Jay’s terms, “the cynosure of all eyes.”63 However, under this man’s eyes, Clay experiences becoming invisible: he is conscious of not being the subject of the man’s look while he is its object, the one to which the man’s look is directed. An alternative reading would suggest that Clay is offering a more or less self-conscious analysis of the situation, and this is important, as this ability to analyze is not present in Ellis’s later narrators. The scene mirrors the sense of the loss of a feeling of presence within social space. Other Los Angeles subjects express a similar awareness of their diminishment. Randy, Anne’s friend in The Informers, “feels that he’s disintegrating” (I, 146) and another character, Dirk, remarks, “I feel like a big smudge” (I, 11). At other times the subjects are described solely as objects, implying the status of the subject as a social object. Early in Less Than Zero, Clay gives examples of his friends verifying him as a material object when they comment on his appearance: Blair says to Clay, “[y]ou look pale” (LTZ, 2). Trent makes precisely the same comment (LTZ, 6), and Alana reiterates: “You look kinda pale, Clay. You should get some sun” (LTZ, 9). His father similarly reflects back to Clay an objectified image as he refers

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to him simply as “my son” (LTZ, 42), allocating Clay the status of a possessed object (my car, my house) as opposed to a living being. Accompanying this objectification by others, the characters show signs of the objectification of their own images as a source of libidinal gratification. In Ellis’s early novels, the characters perpetually wear sunglasses. The function of sunglasses in the novels is not simply protection against the unremitting California sun but also to shield the subjects from what they fear: insubstantiality and transparency. The lenses, however, have a paradoxical alienating effect. Sunglasses place a barrier between the eyes of the subject and the external world. They also act as a reflection of anything that they encounter. The lens is effectively a two-way mirror through which one can see without being seen. The distanciation associated with sunglasses is epitomized in the scene with Clay and the girl he picks up at the club “After Hours.” As part of her seduction ritual, the girl hands Clay, who is naked on her bed, a tube of Bain de Soleil and a pair of Wayfarers and tells him to put them on. She motions for them both to touch themselves and, when Clay reaches over to touch her body, she refuses him and places his hand back on himself. As he is about to reach orgasm, Clay takes the sunglasses off, but she insists again that he put them back on (LTZ, 110-11). This scene illustrates not only one subject refusing physical contact with another but alongside that refusal, the denial of the other’s gaze. The alienation of subjects in this encounter is furthered by the implication that the girl is simply watching herself masturbate in the lenses of the Wayfarers. The girl not only refuses sexual union in favor of masturbation but also turns her own gaze back upon herself. She essentially becomes her own voyeur. The implication is that, narcissistically, it is only her reflection that brings her pleasure. By refusing Clay’s touch and his sight, she isolates herself from any emotive expression from the other while at the same gaining satisfaction from both her own sight and her own touch. She is the perfect emblem of the narcissist as she looks at herself looking at herself.

The Mirror as a Social Void Narcissus, Julia Kristeva observes, “turns sight into origin.”64 This Kristeva sees as the way in which Narcissus “breaks with the ancient world” and “seeks the other opposite himself, as product of his own sight.” For this reason, Kristeva understands the mythical Narcissus to be a very modern character: “He then discovers that the reflection is no other but represents himself, that the other is the presentation

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of the self. Thus, in his own way, Narcissus discovers in sorrow and death the alienation that is constituent of his own image.”65 The modern Narcissus is melancholic. Examining Adorno’s work Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, Wolf Lepenies draws on Adorno’s statement that “[m]irror and mourning belong together.”66 He remarks that “this sentence contains the link between the melancholic situation of the intérieur and the recognition of a loss of world and a growing yearning for reflection.”67 In Less Than Zero, the notion of an intérieur, which, in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, is closely aligned with the role of subjectivity, is absent, as subjectivity itself has been curtailed. Clay shows precisely the recognition of loss and yearning for self-reflection that Lepenies articulates, but he cannot place his loss or engage in the act of self-reflection on any meaningful level. Thus the only form of reflection Clay can engage in is specular reflection, a turn to the outward image of himself to compensate for his lack of interiority. The ontological lack inherent in the subjects’ reflective discourse is in this way underlined by Clay’s mirror encounters in Less Than Zero. At the same time, the condition of Clay’s contemporary narcissism is determined by the antagonistic social reality. According to Adorno, a fundamental consequence of the condition of repressive desublimation is that “the demolition of the Ego strengthens narcissism and its collective derivations.”68 The abundance of reflective surfaces in Less Than Zero produces narcissistic encounters that function to accelerate the erasure of the subject. Yet these sites of reflection are paradoxical, acting simultaneously as sites of alienation for the subject and as superficial reification of the subject’s identity. For Žižek, the absurdity of the contemporary subject’s ontological predicament resides in the fact that the subject’s endeavor to fill in the gap of subjectivity “retroactively sustains and generates this gap.”69 This is the aporia at the heart of Ellis’s novels, and the clearest instances of this in Less Than Zero occur in Clay’s dependence on his mirror image as a point of (imagined) self-enunciation. At the beginning of the novel, Clay wakes up at Griffin’s house after Blair’s party and goes into the bathroom: “I take a piss and stare at myself, nude, in the mirror for a while, and then lean against the sink and turn the faucet on and splash cold water on my face. Then I look at myself in the mirror again, this time longer” (LTZ, 30). That he stares at himself naked, splashes water on his face, and then repeats the reflective gesture suggests that Clay is seeking something through the process of image reflection, something that was not there in his initial reflection. Sunglasses and tinted windows in Less Than Zero offer further examples of reflection. Clay’s narrative does not

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provide the reader with any insight into the psychology behind Clay’s mirror encounters, an elliptical absence that signals his lack of interiority. Indeed, for the most part, his narrative itself acts as a mirror: the constant descriptions of what people are wearing accompanied by their superficial communications serves merely as a reflection of the subjects, as if Clay’s eyes are the mirror into which they are looking. What Clay seeks in his image provided by various reflective apparatuses in the novel is a reflection that reasserts his presence as a unified and whole individual. Clay describes driving out to the desert at Christmas: It was strange to drive down 110 at one or two in the morning. There wouldn’t be any cars out, and if I stopped by the side of the road and turned the radio off and rolled down the windows, I couldn’t hear anything. Only my own breath, which was all raspy and dry and came in uneven gasps. But I wouldn’t do this for long, because I’d catch a glimpse of my eyes in the rear view mirror, sockets red, scared, and I’d get really frightened for some reason and drive home quickly. (LTZ, 60)

It is his own reflection that here provokes Clay’s fear. At the same time, his mirror image also signifies that fear and denotes a splitting of the “I.” Clay’s narrative investment in moments of reflection do not have the intended effect of reassuring him of his presence but instead gesture toward an increasing condition which Žižek articulates in Hegelian terms as “the self-alienation of the subject who does not recognize himself in his own product.”70 The mirror functions antagonistically in these instances. Clay’s cracked grin and stricken face, rather than verifying the subject as unabridged, reflects back a divided and estranged self. Clay then does not at all times encounter the image he expects to find in his reflection. At the club “After Hours,” when Clay goes to the restroom, he locks the door and, again, stares at himself in the mirror. He describes people knocking on the door as he leans against it and cries “for around five minutes” (LTZ, 109). The discrepancy between Clay’s blank narrative and his emotional outbursts is apparent in these instances, and here it is the mirror that appears to produce a moment of affect. He narrates the scenes with total detachment and yet they involve outbursts of anxiety that the narrator is unable to validate or narrativize. The mirror registers both the transformation of the narrator into a sign of himself, a reflection of his physical image that reifies him as subject, and also moments

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of profound objectivity in which the mirror serves to throw back an unexpected image of the subject, to indicate a state he himself was unaware of, and consequently accentuate and represent his condition of alienation. This alienation is not simply isolation from his social surroundings but also, as these mirror images make clear, from his own psyche. At certain moments in the text, Clay’s reflection in the mirror produces distorted images. The moments of distortion break the mimesis of the exterior world and instead provide the reader with the only points in the texts in which the narrator meditates on his distorted reflection as a point of self-enunciation. For example, he wakes up in his house and comments on what he sees in the mirror: “[S]un is flooding the room through the Venetian blinds and when I look in the mirror it gives the impression that I have this wild, cracked grin” (LTZ, 32). In this distorted reflection, a gap opens up in the text and offers the possibility of a different perception of the narrator. He closes this gap by going to the closet mirror to look at his face and body. He flexes his muscles and wonders if he should get a haircut. The first image suggested a sinister side to Clay in the image he perceived of himself in the cracked mirror. The movement between his distorted image and his actual image articulates the gap between subjective and objective states. The image he encounters in the unbroken mirror is merely that of his physical body. It is this objective image that his superficial presence in his social space is contingent upon.

“Trust” Throughout his narrative, Clay invests his poster of Elvis Costello with authority. Clay’s poster of Elvis Costello provides an unstable point of reference and points to the ambivalence inherent in the subject’s experience in the novel. The “Trust” poster functions as a coordinate for Clay but the instability of that coordinate points to his sociopolitical predicament. Pamela Thurschwell has commented, “Costello maintains the category of the human as an index of what is dangerously disappearing under late capital.”71 When Clay first arrives home, Elvis looks past me with this wry, ironic smile on his lips, staring out the window. The word “Trust” hovering over his head, and his sunglasses, one lens red, the other blue, pushed down past the ridge of his nose so that you can see his eyes, which are slightly off center. The eyes don’t look at me, though. They only look at whoever’s

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standing by the window, but I’m too tired to get up and stand by the window. (LTZ, 3)

In this passage, Clay’s instinct is to go and stand by the window in order to become the subject of Costello’s gaze. The image on the cover of the 1981 “Trust” album evokes a sense of ridicule. The lenses of Elvis’s sunglasses reflect the red and blue Republican and Democrat states of America. The word “Trust” that hovers above his head appears to be undirected. Its meaning is ambiguous, and instead of looking through the lenses, Costello looks above and beyond them, resisting their political filters. The poster is on one level a political imposition: “Trust” is clearly an allusion to Reagan’s favorite political slogan “Trust, but verify.” However, in its ambiguity, the “Trust” poster infers the very opposite. Harvey remarks that “[p]olitical slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices.” He takes the example of the word “freedom,” which “resonates so widely with the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes ‘a button that elites can press to open the door to the masses’ to justify almost anything.”72 Harvey’s comments are equally applicable to the political byword “trust”. Harvey cites Antonio Gramsci’s conclusion that “political questions become ‘insoluble’ when ‘disguised as cultural ones.’ ”73 Less Than Zero is littered with markers that have double-voiced political implications. The “Trust” poster and the billboard for the resort that reads “Disappear Here” are just two examples. The persistence of these markers in Clay’s narrative overrides the subject. The political implication of deception in the “Trust” image is further underlined by Costello’s mocking look. Harvey highlights the duplicity of neoliberalist policies: the tension between neoliberalist theory and the actual pragmatism of its politics. There are, he states, “enough contradictions in the neoliberal position to render evolving neoliberal practices (vis-à-vis issues such as monopoly power and market failures) unrecognizable in relation to the seeming purity of neoliberal doctrine.”74 The hovering “Trust” then is unstable in its neoliberalist context. As well as functioning as a political injunction, “Trust” refers both to corporations that attempt to gain monopolistic control of a market and the notion of a trust fund. Thus the poster operates to conflate the neoliberalist objectives of the policies of privatization and deregulation implemented in the period, which had the effect of putting the power and the capitalist gain in the hands of the corporations, and the postwar restoration of class power. As the narrative progresses,

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Costello’s look becomes more threatening. The wind wakes Clay up one night and he looks over at the poster: “and his eyes are looking out the window, beyond, into the night, and his face looks almost alarmed at what it might be seeing, the word “Trust” above the worried face” (LTZ, 54). Clay associates Costello’s worried look with the billboard that reads “Disappear Here” and the way Julian looked past him at Café Casino (LTZ, 54). The disunion between Costello’s fear and the injunction above his image to have faith incites panic in Clay because it reveals to him the schism between the subject and social space, and it also points to the tension between the two forms of corporate and inherited “Trust.” Toward the end of the novel, Clay discovers that Julian has turned to male prostitution to pay off his debts. Julian’s boss, Finn, is a businessman, prostituting young men out to business clients. Clay agrees to watch Julian’s client have sex with him. While Ellis does not provide explicit details of the scene, that Clay watches for five hours implies a high degree of abuse of Julian’s body. The transaction points to neoliberalist power relations in which the corporate client becomes dominant over inherited wealth. After her abortion, Alana goes over to Clay’s house and he reports a fear of the poster: “I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get away from it so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like ‘I think we’ve all lost some kind of feeling.’ ” (LTZ, 146) In this encounter with the poster, Costello is perceived by Clay to be watching him and Alana. It implies a connection between the threat of the poster and Alana’s situation inferring the judgment imposed by Reagan’s pro-life political stance. Yet it also highlights once again the failure of the phatic code, for while Alana views Clay’s gesture as an act of compassion, for Clay it is an act of eliminating the threat that the poster imposes.

Ideological Violence The failure of the phatic code at points produces not indifference but hostility. Within the mode of narcissistic subjectivity, Žižek claims that “the ‘other’ as such—the real, desiring other—is experienced as a traumatic disturbance, as something that interrupts the closed equilibrium of my Ego.” “Whatever the other does,” Žižek explains, “[i]f s ⁄ he fondles me, if s ⁄ he smokes, if s ⁄ he utters a reproach, if s ⁄ he looks at me lustfully . . . it is (potentially, at least) a violent encroachment upon my space.”75 The intolerance of the other is shown in both

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the subjects’ racial prejudices against those outside of their elite circle and their discrimination toward the other subjects in their social group. In The Rules of Attraction, for example, Paul sits down at a table at which his friends are compiling a student “black list,” a list of students they find intolerable. The list is long and involves categorizing the other, for example: “[a]nyone with beards or facial hair,” “[p]eople who consider themselves born again,” and “[a]nyone with a harelip” (ROA, 30−31). Paul is not disgusted at his friends’ bigotry, but instead he remarks, “I couldn’t stand this twisted faggy banter so early in the morning” (ROA, 30). Paul’s own inherent intolerance mirrors in this passage that which he condemns in the other. Racism prevails throughout the novel; for instance, Sean refers to his French roommate Bertrand as “the frog,” and Victor’s recollection of his Europe trip reads like a catalog of stereotypes that he imposes on the other cultures that he encounters in Europe (ROA, 16−20). Writing on minoritization and domination in Los Angeles, Julian Murphet has commented in depth on the “radical minoritization”76 that has taken place in Los Angeles in the latter part of the twentieth century. Murphet recognizes that this minoritization is far from democratic: “[T]he principle challenge may rest in squaring the conceptual circle of a minoritized space in which the dominant block rules ever more supreme, only from the outside, from the suburban hinterlands, tax-rich white edge cities and eerily insubstantial multinational corporations.”77 Indeed, Murphet points out, “[w]hat is most startling is the ratio of minoritization to economic polarization.”78 In many ways, the Los Angeles in Ellis’s novels, with the subjects situated clearly within the private white spaces of the Los Angeles elite, reflects the reconfiguration of class relations that empowered the wealthy in Reagan’s policies. Racism and elitism operate in these three novels both within the particular demographic of Los Angeles and on a wider level. At a party in Malibu, Clay describes seeing two dogs running along the empty beach: “One of the blond boys call out to them, ‘Hanoi, Saigon, come here,’ and the dogs, both Dobermans, come leaping gracefully onto the deck” (LTZ, 140). The names of the dogs and their dutiful behavior toward the white blond American boys calls to mind the American imperialist occupation in Vietnam and act as prime metaphors for American neoimperial relations. A train journey from New Hampshire to New Mexico provides the setting for the sixth narrative of The Informers. As the train moves through the New Mexico landscape, the narrator describes her disenchanted perception of the scene as “endless rows of backyards, pale laundry hanging on lines, rusted toys, bent slides, crooked swing

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sets” (I, 68) and she feels moved to start humming the U.S. folk song “This Land is Your Land.” Written by Woody Guthrie, the song was intended as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” New Mexico and Arizona function as textual markers of America’s nineteenth-century imperialism; in this case, the Mexican-American War (the U.S. acquired the states in 1848). In the dining car of the train, the narrator notices “that all the waiters are black and that the train passengers are mainly old people and foreigners” (I, 71). As the train passes through Arizona, the narrator observes a family of five coming out of Pizza Hut waving at the train. Whereas her response is to question why a family would take their children to Pizza Hut for breakfast, the boy from Venezuela, whom she has met on the train, waves back to the child in front of the restaurant and then smiles at her (I, 73). The two gestures of social exchange by the Venezuelan boy contrast with the social impotence of the narrator who pretends to concentrate on her stale breakfast as a method of avoiding social contact. She takes a Valium from her bag, and in her search to identify with someone of her own age on the train, the girl notices that “[e]xcept for the rich boy from Venezuela who has been to El Salvador, the only other person remotely my age is a homely, sadfaced black girl who is staring at me from across the dining car, which causes me to squeeze the Valium harder. I wait for the girl to turn away,” she says, “and when she does I finally swallow the pill” (I, 73). In this scene it is ambiguous as to whether the girl’s sadness elicits anxiety in the narrator or whether her very presence evokes the anxiety. The statement following this incident points to the latter: “The black girl glances at me once more and then gets up and is replaced by this totally fat couple who are wearing lots of turquoise.” The narrator’s language in this incident points to a one-sided hostility originating in her perception rather than a clash of different cultures. Thus Ellis presents fundamentally asymmetrical intersubjective relations. This is underlined further by the narrator’s hostile description of the “totally fat couple” who replace the African American girl. “One thing alienation means,” Žižek claims, “is that distance is woven into the very social texture of everyday life.”79 The narrator’s experience on the train journey highlights her distance and antipathy toward what she conceives to be the other. “Buzzed” from the Valium she has taken, the narrator does finally engage minimally in a conversation with an older woman from Reseda. But the narrator confesses that she only has a “partial understanding” of where the city of Reseda is. While Reseda is within Los Angeles, the community is 65 percent Latino/Hispanic. Ironically and perhaps even insensitively, the

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narrator hands the woman her copy of Vanity Fair, with its expensive advertisements that the narrator describes as “showing me the best way to live” (I, 81). The woman, she states, “takes it from me in the same spirit in which it is offered even though it looks as if she doesn’t want to” (I, 81). The social antagonism in The Informers accelerates as the narratives increase. Žižek identifies racism as a form of ideological violence. The subject’s racism can be framed alongside the references to the U.S. imperial tradition and read in a corresponding relation to the traces of imperialism in the novel. The relations between the white elite subjects and the other citizens in Los Angeles act as points of enunciation of ideological violence. The Mexican population of Los Angeles is referred to throughout the narratives. Mexicans serve the subjects in restaurants (I, 85); the door in the toilet of a restaurant is covered in Mexican graffiti (I, 99); the maids in the households are Hispanic, and Mexican boys in Chevrolet trucks appear as the economical antithetical other to the white boys in their Porsches (I, 79). These narrative markers articulate the social and economic divide in Los Angeles. Two instances point to a possible ambiguity in relations with the Hispanic population of the city. Cheryl tells Danny, “[s]omeone snapped off my windshield wipers today, for some reason . . . They left a note. It said ‘Mi hermana’ ” (I, 83). In a later narrative, which I will return to again in my discussion of the “bystander syndrome,” a Hispanic girl almost gets run over. Having crossed the street, she walks up to Graham and whispers, “Mi Hermano” three times before disappearing in the crowd. Graham’s girlfriend, Christie, is irritated by the girl’s actions: “Really—they’re overrunning the city,” Christie says. “She was probably stoned out of her mind.” She pulls out her ticket, handing me mine. The people who were talking about the drug bust and 1985 turn around, look at Christie like they recognize her. “What did she say?” I ask. “Me hermano? I think it’s a kind of chicken enchilada with a lot of salsa,” Christie says. “Maybe it’s a taco, who knows?” She shrugs uncomfortably. “These implants are killing me and it’s so hot.” (I, 171)

“Mi hermana” and “Mi hermano” translate as “my sister” and “my brother.” The ideological violence inflicted by Cheryl’s presumption that the Hispanic who left the note was also responsible for vandalizing her car and Christie’s racist comments contrast with the gestures

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of the Hispanic inhabitants of the city. The hypocrisy of Christie’s comments is deafening, as Christie and the rest of the subjects in the novels consume cocaine regularly, fueling the drug trafficking into the United States from across the border in Mexico. Later in the monologue, Graham witnesses another incident. Waiting at a stoplight in his Porsche, he states, “[a] black boy runs out of the parking lot of the Hughes supermarket on the corner of Beverly and past my car. Two store clerks and a security guard follow him. The boy throws something in the street and runs away into the darkness of West Hollywood, followed by the three men” (I, 174). Graham gets out of the car and picks up what the African American boy dropped. It’s a package of filet mignon, and staring at it beneath the overhead glare of a neon light, I can see that some of the juice seeping from the Styrofoam is running down the length of my hand to my wrist, staining the cuff of a white Comme des Garçons shirt I’m wearing. I put the piece of meat back down, carefully wipe my hand on the back of my jeans, then get into my car. (I, 173– 4)

The blood from the steak stolen by an impoverished African American boy stains the white designer shirt of the narrator, a bloodstain representative of ideological violence. This image acquires further significance in the following narrative. The narrator, a vampire, confesses to his friend Miranda, “I hate hanging out with niggers” (I, 181) and repetitively tells her Ethiopian jokes over a multiple steak dinner at the Ivy. In this episode and elsewhere, the narrator’s language is, to use Žižek’s terms, “infected by violence,” a contamination that occurs “under the influence of contingent ‘pathological’ circumstances which distort the inherent logic of symbolic communication.”80 Furthermore there is a clear relation here between the ideological violence of neoliberalism and reification. Bewes remarks: “In the broader socio-political sphere, reification is what happens in every instance of racism and sexism, where the objects of prejudice are perceived not as human beings but as things or ‘types’.”81 It is not an aleatory detail that Miranda, who is also a vampire, has just returned from New York where she checked out a “private fund-raising party for George Bush,” which she thought was “just smashing” (I, 178). Later the vampire narrator stops at the same twenty-four-hour supermarket on Beverly and Doheny that the African American boy was seen running from, where he spends seven hundred and forty dollars on filet mignon (I, 183).

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Ellis’s use of the figure of the vampire has often been overlooked. Yet vampires in The Informers play a crucial role in the novel as contemporary tropes of the underside of the political and cultural apparatus. Jungian theorist Nathan Schwartz-Salant sees the vampire as the “perfect shadow of Narcissus” as “an identity-less force.”82 The new posttraumatic subject, Žižek asserts “lives death as a form of life—his or her life is the death drive embodied.”83 Cheryl indicates this to her ex-lover William in the sixth monologue. William’s admittance that he still wants her elicits surprise from Cheryl. When William questions why it is surprising, she responds: “You were never there. You were never there . . . You were never alive.” When William “feebly” replies that he was alive, Cheryl refutes his weak assertion, stating, “[y]ou were just . . . not dead” (I, 102). William’s absence here is linked to his state of death-in-life. The vampires in The Informers are the reverse mode of the new subjects in which death as a form of life is revealed in a literal image, a force that bleeds and empties others of life. Vampirism is here the underside of melancholy, the double of the neoliberalist subject. Veronica Hollinger reads the postmodern vampire as a “deconstructive figure”84 and one that embodies what Hollinger terms a “fantasy of absence.”85 This is why Jamie, the vampire in chapter ten (and the dead boy from the second monologue), is not affected by the billboard that reads “Disappear Here” (I, 184). Compared to the melancholic subjects, the vampires appear as having a greater sense of presence in the narratives. Yet contemporary vampires are, for Hollinger, “victims of the self-same absence they have come to represent; and they are as trapped within the framework of meaninglessness as their human counterparts.”86 While the sign “Disappear Here” poses no threat to Jamie, he reports that the intermittent vanishing of the lower case “t” in the “Thrifty” sign weakens him: I suddenly see that Thrifty drugstore sign coming up, the huge neonblue lower case t flashing off and on, floating above buildings and billboards, the moon hanging low behind it, above it, and I’m getting closer to it, getting weak, and I make this totally illegal U-turn, and still feeling sort of sick but better the farther I get from it . . . (I, 184)

The threat of the sign, which denotes economic restriction, suggests that the vampire also functions as a trope of economic and material waste. Read as such, the vampire is symbolic of excess. This excess of the vampire is revealed more explicitly as political greed in Ellis’s later novel, Imperial Bedrooms, which, I claim in the final chapter of this

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book, mirrors and extends the neoliberalist critique initiated in these three early works.

Bystanders The prevailing condition of melancholy in The Informers generates a form of “bystander syndrome.” This term originated in the 1960s and was used to coin what was reported as the reaction of witnesses to the murder of Catherine Genovese on March 13, 1964. According to The New York Times, “[f]or more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.”87 Cheryl, one of the narrators in The Informers, is working on a story about the twentieth anniversary of “the Kitty Genovese slaying” (I, 88). The case received considerable controversy and there were many reports subsequent to the initial coverage in The New York Times that refuted the claim that there were 38 passive bystanders.88 Nevertheless, the case instigated an investigation into the psychological social syndrome of what became known in social psychology as “bystander syndrome.” Psychologists define the syndrome as “[t]he effect of others on an individual’s perception of and response to a situation.”89 The research suggested that within a group of multiple persons witnessing a crime or experiencing an emergency, there occurs a diffusion of responsibility, which leads to a form of social paralysis, whereby no bystander takes action to help the victim or address the emergency. “When others are present, not taking action or behaving as if nothing were wrong, all observers tend to view the situation as a nonemergency.” 90 Psychologists have described the phenomenon as “pluralistic ignorance” whereby “the behavior of the group causes each individual to be lured into inaction.” 91 A clear instance of the bystander effect takes place in the ninth monologue, which I have discussed previously. Graham and his girlfriend are standing in a queue for the movies. I watch as a young Hispanic girl crosses the street, moving toward the theater. As she crosses the street in long, purposeful strides, a black convertible Rolls-Royce almost hits her, braking suddenly, swerving. The people on the sidewalk watch silently. One girl, maybe, says “oh no.” The driver of the Corniche, a tan guy, shirtless and wearing a sailor’s cap, smoking a cigar, yells “Watch out, you dumb spic” and the girl, not shaken at all, walks calmly to the other side of the street. (I, 170)

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Here the diffusion of responsibility could clearly be linked to the subjects’ racism and the socio-symbolic violence of social exclusion. Scholars such as Henry R. Huttenbach have considered the bystander effect on a wider cultural level in terms of countries that do not intervene to stop genocide. Huttenbach states “[b]y definition, the bystander prefers to stand in a morally neutral zone, informed but unmoved, the mind divorced from the heart by the gymnastics of obscurantist rationalizations and hollow justifications.” 92 The phenomenon then can be extended to a political metaphor and the pluralistic ignorance of the subjects seen as an effect of the Vietnam War as well as the cultural mirror of a political climate that withdrew from domestic interventionalist policies to promote privatization and unilateral individualism. In The Informers, the bystander effect, which is also termed “bystander apathy” by psychologists, is manifested in the subjects’ narratives in an internalized form by which they are unable to connect to the other, an extreme form of phatic failure. Murphet has commented on the paratactic clauses in the “blank” novels that tend to place two (often formally very different sentences) side by side.93 The use of parataxis can be viewed in terms of the bystander effect as it divides the narrative clauses into a split relation in which the narrator is placed in a state of detachment. Cheryl herself exhibits this condition when she states: “I hang up the phone and stare at pictures of Kitty Genovese’s dead body and William doesn’t call me back” (I, 88). Her observation of Kitty’s dead body elicits no effect, the paratactic alignment of the two clauses emphasizes the position of the narrator as detached observer and thus reproduces the neglect of the victim, Kitty. In the second narrative, four friends meet up on the anniversary of Jamie’s death. I am so surprised by Raymond’s emotion that I lean against the wall and just stare, watching him bunch his hands into fists. “He was my friend,” he says between intakes of breath, not looking up at me. I’m looking at the yellowed tile on the wall for a long time, wondering how the waiter, who I am positive I had asked not to put garbanzo beans in my salad, actually had. Where was the waiter born, why had he come to Mario’s, hadn’t he looked at the salad, didn’t he understand?” “He liked you . . . too,” I finally say. (I, 14)

For the narrator, his friend’s emotional outburst elicits no empathy. The break into contemplating why the waiter had put garbanzo beans

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in his salad emerges as a moment that aestheticizes the indifference and the solitary condition of the subject. What is explicit in this scene is what Žižek understands as “the psychic consequences of traumatic intrusions which cannot be integrated into a psychic staging—such as indifference, the loss of affect.”94 Ellis exploits the first-person narrative, and his capacity as an author to enact bystander apathy to position the reader in the uncomfortable position of apathetic observer. In The Informers, then, the detached position of the subject is aligned with a form of autism. In the third monologue, the narrator describes her friend Eve as being quiet at lunch. The reason for this, she explains, is that “[h]er daughter is in a psychiatric hospital in Camarillo.” She continues, “Eve’s daughter tried to kill herself by shooting herself in the stomach. I can’t understand why Eve’s daughter did not shoot herself in the head” (I, 23). The lack of psychological depth and the use of these paratactic statements preclude any form of hermeneutics in The Informers. The same narrator reports, “[m]y mother, her skin yellow, her body thin and frail from lack of food, is dying in a large, empty house that overlooks the bay in San Francisco. The poolboy has set traps smudged with peanut butter around the edges of the pool. Randomness. Surrender” (I, 32). Earlier in her narrative, the narrator reports hearing a song coming from the den in her house, the woman singing “circumstance beyond our control” (I, 19), a textual marker that suggests that it is a result of systemic violence that the subjects are in this condition. A feature of the new subject is that he or she lives “a life deprived of erotic engagement.” 95 This lack of erotic engagement is underscored in the subjects’ sexual encounters. Cheryl is lying next to Danny, her young lover. My breathing steady, I feel the touch of two dry fingers trailing up my leg. I lie perfectly still, eyes closed, and he touches me, no heat in the touch, and then he climbs gently on top of me and I lie perfectly still but soon have to open my eyes because I’m breathing too hard. The instant I do he softens, rolls off. When I wake up in the middle of the night he’s gone. (I, 94)

This description of the encounter between two disengaged subjects suggests a necrophilic encounter whereby Danny is aroused by Cheryl’s state of death-like immobility. As Lisa Downing has remarked in her important study on necrophilia, “[n]ecrophilia hints at the imaginative collusion between life and death, an ambitious leap between physical and the metaphysical.” Downing argues that “[t]he obscure

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spark of desire in necrophilia lies precisely in the gap between the living erotic imagination and the object that is beyond desire.” 96 Ellis complicates this necrophilic relation by having both of his subjects as living death as a form of life, a condition that necessarily bars erotic engagement and collapses the gap between life and death. Desire for Danny is only possible in Cheryl’s absence, thus it is absence that here triggers desire. Research in psychology has suggested that one of the central factors that provoke necrophilic desire is the need to overcome isolation.97 Danny’s impotence, triggered by Cheryl’s sight, signals the boundaries of his necrophilic desire, which disappears the moment she shows signs of life. Absence and desire are registered in the subject’s gaze. The melancholic in Ellis’s three novels has neither a historical past for which his or her gaze is nostalgic nor a melancholic object. As such, the gaze is rendered blank. The subjects of The Informers show the impasse found in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melancolia I (1514). Dürer’s great figure of Melancholy is pensive, having turned away from the light. She is surrounded by all the objects that symbolize her temperament, and the tools that could create the material world reside at her feet. As Gibson points out, for Dürer “the melancholic turned aside from the vista, ignoring it for the viewless gaze, the stare into empty space.” 98 The vacancy of Martin’s gaze disturbs the narrator of the third monologue. She dreams of falling from her young lover’s balcony. Lying on the asphalt on her stomach, her neck twisted completely around, she states: “I look up and focus on Martin’s handsome face staring down at me with a benign smile. It’s the serenity in that smile—not really the fall or the imagined image of cracked bleeding body - that wakes me up” (I, 16). The lack of psychological interiority in the other is here experienced as a traumatic disturbance. Martin here is the bystander and his indifference is horrific. Les describes his son looking at him “and as I’m confronted with that blank stare,” he states, “my decision not to pursue it is made” (I, 59). The absent gaze is experienced in this instance as violent. However, the violence can be attributed to neither sadism nor masochism, as such “detached psyches”, Žižek observes with reference to Catherine Malabou, are “beyond love and hate.” 99 Other encounters with the gaze revalue the experience. The same female narrator of the third monologue describes the lover’s gaze in another instance as “rendering everything inconsequential, pools incapable of remembering anything. I moved into them,” she states, “until I was comfortable” (I, 94). The duality of a space of retreat and a threat embodied by the gaze parallels Clay’s reaction to the universal statement at the outset of Less Than Zero.

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The ubiquitous blank gaze in The Informers signifies at once the absence of the subjects and a form of desire. Freud defined absence as the condition in which subjects were “waiting for something that was not coming”.100 Graham’s mother states: “Graham, looking wary and hungover, stares out the window and over at Tower Records across the street with a longing that surprises me” (I, 29). In a similar vein, “Tim looks out at the sea, warm, stretching out like a flat blue sheet to the horizon, his eyes disappointed at finding the same flatness” (I, 67). Graham’s “longing” and Tim’s “disappointment” signal a desire, not for the other but for the event, their desire stemming from “the perspective of a world in which it did not appear.”101

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CH A P T ER

2

An Inner Critique: Commodity Fetishism, Systemic Violence, and the Abstract Mutilated Subject in American Psycho

What keeps mankind alive? The fact that millions Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced oppressed. Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance In keeping its humanity repressed. For once you must not try to shirk the facts: Mankind is kept alive by its bestial acts. —Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera1

In the wake of the economic crisis of 2007 caused by an overvaluation of assets in the American banking system, American Psycho has gained significance among its critics for its specific political and economic context, as both a cultural document and a prophetic allegory. The book functions at two levels, which are central to Ellis’s act of underwriting. It documents the repression at work in the commodity society of the 1980s, the merging of the subject with the economic apparatus shown in Price’s definition of himself at the outset of the novel: “I’m resourceful . . . I’m creative, I’m young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset” (AP, 3). Set at the end of the eighties, the novel disinters how this subject-apparatus merger resulted in the liquidation of subjectivity. On a more micro and culturally specific level, the book critiques the cultural milieu of New York in the 1980s through subverting the icon of the city’s prosperity: the Wall Street banker.

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Since its publication in 1991, the book has received an abundance of critical attention. Many studies have focused on the publication issues surrounding the book. Of these studies, Elizabeth Young’s early essay, published just one year after the book’s publication, remains perhaps the most cited critique of the book and its controversial reception by the literary establishment. Young situates Ellis’s novel within the context of writers such as Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and William Burroughs in order to draw attention to the fact that American Psycho received such an extreme critical backlash by the media precisely because Ellis had been groomed by the establishment, heralded as a “ ‘serious novelist—young, relevant, living’ and perhaps most importantly ‘mainstream.’ ”2 Young remarks on the fictionality of the book and the fact that Patrick Bateman cannot exist, a critical observation that has become commonplace since Young’s study but nevertheless was an important and sharp observation in 1992, before the book had received the academic attention that it deserves. Young’s analysis drew attention to the unreliability of Patrick Bateman as a narrator, and this was an important development in the criticism of the book. As I stated in the Introduction, Rosa A. Eberly provides the most exhaustive examination of the media controversy surrounding the book in her notable study of literary public spheres, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (2000). Eberly views American Psycho in the context of the changing nature of publicity. Like Young, she understands the book to be a consumer item. Ellis’s book, Eberly concludes, “encouraged at least some discussion of publicity as manipulation in late capitalism in a media culture that is ultimately controlled by only a very few elites.”3 Recent critics such as Naomi Mandel have provided important interpretations of the novel that acknowledge its ethical underpinnings, rather than asserting a moral component in the novel. While Young’s earlier study is important, Ellis is a lot more slippery than Young gives him credit for. Young asserts that “[t]he faults Ellis perceives in contemporary culture come from an old-fashioned, straightforwardly moralistic reading of it.” Ellis’s vision, she argues, “is conformist and conventional.”4 Mandel’s reading of the novel is much sharper than Young’s in this respect. She argues that to understand violence as a form of critique is to apprehend the value of American Psycho “as a site where the relation between violence and representation can be addressed.”5 That the initial media criticism surrounding its publication missed the political and ethical dimension to the novel entirely, or, in the case of Todd Stiles’s article, rejected any possible cultural critique as simply “callow cynicism”6 on behalf of its

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author, only serves to verify the moral indoctrination of the society in which the novel was received. For instance, Norman Mailer refused to defend the book on the grounds that it lacked moral purpose.7 This is a critical response that not only entirely overlooks the book’s double function (and one that reveals the problematics of approaching a work with such criteria as moral purpose) but also exhibits a somewhat restrictive conservative morality on Mailer’s behalf.8 Mailer’s desire in his criticism of the book is for some kind of moral redemption, which is clearly not present in the book. But the lack of any form of moral, political or aesthetic redemption in the narrative is precisely the literary value of the work. American Psycho reveals the desideratum of the contemporary to be a form of aesthetic recovery and literary redemption that mainstream American culture was devoid of in the 1980s. Timothy Bewes understands this when he comments that American Psycho (which he terms Ellis’s “nihilistic” novel), “achieves a level of transcendence that is utterly inaccessible to Douglas Coupland’s Godretrieving Girlfriend in a Coma.” 9 For Bewes: “In a reflective age—in which, by definition, the disjunction between form and content is assured—the preservation of transcendence in art is possible only by the refusal of any claim to transcendence . . . Freedom from materiality is achievable not by any conscious self-elevation, but by affirmation of the ubiquity of materiality.”10 Ellis’s act of negation is also an act of affirmation. As Maurice Blanchot observes: “Just as Cartesian representation contains in itself the power of science (the power of conquest, the ability to conquer reality by negating and transforming it), so the artist becomes he who by representing transforms.”11 Blanchot understood art’s “profound disquietude” to be “most evident in literature, which through culture and the forms of language opens immediately to the development of historical action.”12 It is perhaps through Blanchot’s notion of “scandal,” rather than the worn debates over controversy, that we can best understand Ellis’s transformation of the contemporary into literature in American Psycho. To consider the work in terms of scandal is to understand the book with regards to the power of the work to impose “base things, actions of which it is not proper to speak,” that amounts to an assertion that “with an upsetting, unarguable, and intolerable force, touches us scandalously, however liberal we may be regarding what seems degraded or exalted.”13 For Blanchot, the nature of scandal is such that it escapes us, while we do not escape it—even if we answer it only with laughter, irony, uneasiness and indifference, there is in the situation the story set before us, such a simple

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certainty, although entirely uncertain, linked to such an exclusive and extensive truth that we feel that our attitude, whatever it may be is already part of it and confirms it. There is no way to react to this story that is not already implicated and included within it, immediately testifying to its necessity.14

Critics such as Naomi Mandel15 and Marco Abel16 who have discussed extensively the aesthetic violence that the book might inflict upon the reader and the violence that the book itself suffers at the hands of critics, approach this idea. I suggest that the scandalous nature of American Psycho and its reflection of society has the capacity to affect “the subjective position of enunciation”17 of the reader that remains untouched by today’s forms of political correctness. Thus it is by fact of this “necessity” that, for Blanchot, the scandalous book possesses, that “the book holds us, since it could not leave us intact, a properly scandalous book, if it is the property of scandal that we cannot protect ourselves from it and that we expose ourselves to it the more we try to defend ourselves against it.”18 The enabling space of literature makes American Psycho possible “by letting it change from the pure impossibility of silence to the scandalous truth of being realized in the world.”19 The novel cannot simply be asserted as a straightforward satire.20 Perhaps the incident that attested most problematically to the potential instability of the novel occurred in spring 2006, when an African American striptease artist hired to dance for them at a party accused three members of the lacrosse team at Duke University of rape. The Durham County authorities later revealed that an e-mail message had been written by a team member, who was not one of the rape suspects, that stated he intended to invite strippers to his room, murder them, and then skin them. When questioned, Ryan McFadyen claimed that his remarks were a joke, based on American Psycho. The case points to the volatility of the book’s reception within the public sphere. Ironically, Ellis critiques the ideological violence of the white privileged male in the novel. Yet as an independent piece of public property, the book was clearly susceptible to being admired by the very sector of American society that Ellis sought to critique. This potential instability of the novel evokes a problematic tension in Ellis’s act of underwriting, whereby the novel functions on one level as a form of refusal and a sharp exposition of the systemic violence inherent in capitalism, yet when read literally, it has the capacity to become complicit with power structures. American Psycho is worthy of further sustained analysis despite the large body of criticism that it has previously generated. Through a

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specific engagement with Marcuse’s notion of repressive desublimation and Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, this chapter argues that the novel reveals not simply the gap between Republican political ideology and the real social divide in America, but also an interdependent triad of three forms of violence.21 This triad is revealed as the subjective violence of Patrick’s murders; the systemic violence of global capitalism and Republican ideology (the “counterpart” to the “all-too-visible subjective violence”22 of Patrick’s crimes), and the socio-symbolic violence of social exclusion. Finally, another form of systemic violence frames the novel in the public sphere. Slavoj Žižek perceives this form of violence as being inherent to the tolerant liberal attitude itself that focuses solely on the subjective violence while ignoring the systemic violence that lies beneath contemporary culture.23 I argue that it is this systemic form of violence that Ellis’s critics unwittingly carried out in the controversy that surrounded the book’s publication by focusing with almost fanaticism on Patrick’s murders. The gap between the Republican ideology of the 1980s and “the fundamental social reality”24 represented in the novel has been recognized and commented on by Julian Murphet in his detailed guide to the book. Murphet’s examination of the gentrification of New York and the aftermath of the Tomkins Square Park riots in 1988 offers invaluable insight into that which Murphet terms Patrick’s “gentrifying agenda”25 in the novel. Murphet’s critique of this aspect of the book is encyclopedic, and in terms of the history of gentrification in this period in New York in relation to American Psycho, nothing can or should be added to Murphet’s analysis. Yet Murphet does not view Ellis’s work as possessing an active political function: Ellis does not have a political intelligence; though he does have a protopolitical vision, and wishes to lodge a series of complaints against what a certain class and a certain Party have done to America in the name of free enterprise and the unchecked profit motive. He remains unable, however, to articulate these complaints within a discourse favourable towards any sort of social project.26

This reading of Ellis suggests that the novelist is a straightforward satirist with a conventional political vision. I suggest that Ellis’s composite political critique in the novel plays with a myriad of instabilities and extends into a critique of ideology on a wider level, ultimately leading to a critique of the limitations of political correctness in the cultural arena. While indeed not advancing “any

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sort of social project,” the novel instead offers a new politics of literature that brings to light the systemic violence both inherent to 1980s American culture and to the media coverage of the novel in 1991, operating to uncover contemporary life as necessitating literary redemption. Simultaneously condemned as evil and heralded as a cult novel, I contend that the novel itself, in the vacillation of its critical reception, parallels the oscillation found in the novel between the Marxist fetishized object and the psychoanalytic phobic object. This fluctuation functions to extend Ellis’s critique of the economic, political, and cultural processes from the inside out beyond the limits of the text itself into society. In this sense, the book as commodity acquires a subversive power whereby Marcuse’s idea of a liberationary praxis breaking through into the repressive continuum is inverted and the subversive force comes from within the reified object itself.

The Unsentimental Narrative Ellis, in casting his serial killer as a white privileged unmarried white man working on Wall Street, subverts what Didion termed in 1989 “the sentimental narrative that is New York public life.”27 Didion opens her essay by critiquing the news story “Jogger,” which told of the rape and near death of a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried white woman, an investment banker at Salomon Brothers, in the spring of 1989. She explains that the story “was understood to turn on the demonstrable ‘difference’ between the victim and the accused assailants,” six black and Hispanic teenagers, “four of whom lived in Schomburg Plaza, a federally subsidized apartment complex . . . in East Harlem, and the rest of whom lived in the projects and the rehabilitated tenements just to the north and west of Schomburg Plaza.”28 For Didion, it is due to the cultural differences between the assailants and victim that the woman became “a sacrificial victim” in the “sentimental narrative” of New York, created by the media and the city’s politicians. Didion’s essay resounds with Eberly’s comments regarding a media elite, and highlights the fact that media coverage of rape in New York in the 1980s preferred white middleclass victims as opposed to African American women, crimes against whom barely ever made the headlines or even the papers. But the cultural reception of this case also underlined the elevation of the young banker by the society in the period. The Wall Street bankers in the 1980s were iconographic of the decade’s wealth. Didion reports that the victim, in contrast to her

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apparent attackers (“apparent” because no conclusive evidence was found against them): was a leader, part of what the Times would describe as “the wave of professionals who took over New York in the 1980s,” one of those who were “handsome and pretty and educated and white,” who, according to the Times, not only “believed that they owned the world but had reason to.” She was from a Pittsburgh suburb, Upper St. Clair, the daughter of a retired Westington House Senior Manager. She had been Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley, a graduate of the Yale School of Management, a congressional intern . . . She was reported to be a vegetarian, and “fun-loving,” although “only when time permitted,” and also to have had (these were the Times’ details) “concerns about the ethics of the American business world.”29

Didion cites David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York at the time, stating of the victim: “Despite tremendous odds, she is rebuilding her life. What a human life can do, a human society can do as well.”30 This “conflation of victim and city”31 shows the construction of an ideology around such cases, one that claimed to teach the city a lesson “about courage and class.”32 Didion contrasts the case of “Jogger” with the suspicious death of Laurie Sue Rosenthal. Rosenthal, unlike the “Jogger” victim, lived with her parents in Queens and was the mistress of Peter Franconeri. He was “somebody who knew a lot of people, understood how to live in the city, who had for example not only the apartment on East 68th Street between Madison and Park but a house in Southampton,”33 he also, Didion remarks, “understood that putting a body outside with the trash was nothing to get upset about, if it was handled right.”34 Despite the coroner’s report stating clearly that Rosenthal’s death was a result of an overdose of Darvocet, a distressed late night phone call to her parents the evening of her death in which she told them Franconeri had beaten her, and two unexplained bruises on her body, along with Franconeri’s disposal of the body, cast suspicion on the ruling of suicide. Nevertheless Franconeri walked away with seventy-five hours of community service. Didion comments that the “ultimate shriek of alarm” that the case might have raised was not the cry that New York in the 1980s wanted to recognize.35 Ellis, who at the outset of Sentimental Journeys is acknowledged for “doing time” with its publisher, subverts the sentimental narrative of New York in the figure of Patrick Bateman. Ellis turns the twenty-seven-year-old white bourgeois middle-class Harvard graduate executive from victim/hero to perpetrator, appropriating

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Dinkins’s conflation of bourgeois victim and city into the merger of bourgeois serial killer and city.36 It is not just Dinkins’s New York ideology that Ellis is subverting. Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman grossed $400 million in box office sales. Batman by day is the affluent playboy, philanthropist, and businessman Bruce Wayne. Batman is both superhero and victim. Born to wealthy socialite parents in Gotham City, Wayne becomes Batman to avenge his parents’ death against Joe Chill, a petty mugger who killed Wayne’s parents while attempting to steal their money and jewelry. Batman extends the ideology created in Dinkins’s remarks to a wider audience. Gotham City has two very distinct topographies: the offices and businesses in which the wealthy work and, to use Patrick Bateman’s words describing downtown New York, the “bowels of the city” (AP, 12). This latter topographical site in Batman is home to petty criminals, prostitutes, and people with disfigurements; economic impoverishment is here linked with crime and a lack of humanity. Bateman, just one letter in excess of Batman, reverses the Hollywood ideology of Batman. In Ellis’s New York, the domination of the collective identity of the middle-class banker reveals a master-slave dialectic between the wealthy and disaffected groups, which in Ellis’s novel is symbolic of both Republican ideology and a wider, more universal, sadism. The subjective violence of Patrick’s killings realizes the unseen objective violence of capitalism. American Psycho illustrates the mechanisms of domination of the capitalist system in the 1980s. In this way, American Psycho functions to underwrite both the antinomy between the subject and the general ideology of capitalism, and the socially damaging particular ideologies of New York and Hollywood in the 1980s. Ellis’s novel shows the Marxist “humanist” opposition of “relations between things” and “relations between persons” that Žižek has recently resuscitated. Placing Marx’s opposition in a contemporary context, Žižek asserts: “[I]n the much-celebrated free circulation opened up by global capitalism, it is ‘things’ (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of ‘persons’ is more and more controlled.”37 For Žižek, “the segregation of the people is the reality of economic globalisation,”38 it is “unabashed economic egotism.”39 The fundamental divide that this creates “is one between those included in the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it.”40 Žižek, writing in 2008, situates the beginning of the “happy 90s” (the decade associated with Francis Fukuyama’s dream of the “end of history”) on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. This period ended with 9/11, which brought the era in which “new walls emerged everywhere.”41American

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Psycho documents the period before the “happy 90s,” in which the beginning of this global economic egotism can be seen in microcosm in the American society of the 1980s. In the opening scene at Evelyn’s dinner party, Ellis critiques the divide between the Upper West Side and the East Village in New York in the late 1980s. The double-voiced marker of this is the headline “THE DEATH OF DOWNTOWN,”42 which appears on the front page of Stash’s East Village paper, Deception. Stash and Vanden, Evelyn’s two artist dinner guests, incite strong antagonism in Patrick and Tim Price. Tim, for example, responds to the copy of Deception by pointing at each word in the headline and uttering “[w]ho-givesa-rat’s-ass?” (AP, 13). Ellis, writing retrospectively about the 1980s, was well aware of the war on downtown waged by the conservative right, an antagonism that exploded in the culture wars of the late eighties and early nineties.43 Ellis points to this conflict in his surface narrative both in Price’s and Patrick’s antagonism and also in Evelyn’s condescending “smiling and remarkably good-natured mask” (AP, 16) that she wears when she addresses Stash, a sculptor from the East Village. Whenever Tim or Patrick refer to the East Village, the words “artist” or “art scene” are put in quotation marks in order to emphasize the disregard uptown New York had for its downtown counterpart and to signal the conservative backlash against the arts that began in 1981. Whereas the only way Patrick can conceive of accepting Vanden is to appropriate her by getting rid of the green streak in her hair, making her exercise, and putting her in a Laura Ashley outfit, Evelyn’s patronizing attitude to her downtown friends shows the uptown fetishization of the downtown art scene. This fetishization, which strips the artwork of its hermeneutic value, turns it into a commodity and endows it with a high economic value, is shown repeatedly throughout the novel. Examples include Patrick’s Onica, which Bethany points out to him, is hung upside down (AP, 235), and Paul Owen’s apartment, in which “[s]pooky photographs by Cindy Sherman line the walls everywhere” (AP, 269). Assimilation into the Wall Street sector depreciates the (radical) cultural value of the artwork and eradicates its difference from other objects, as Patrick imagines eradicating Vanden’s difference from the uptown women around him in order to assimilate her into his world. Handsome, educated, and white, Patrick is characterized at the outset as the bourgeois Republican subject who casts himself as having pseudo liberal values. A crucial passage at the outset of American Psycho is important to Ellis’s act of underwriting in the novel.44 At Evelyn’s dinner party, Timothy Price makes a pro-Israeli assessment

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of the Sri Lankan civil war, asking Vanden if she is not aware that “the Sikhs are killing like tons of Israelis there” (AP, 14). Patrick responds by acknowledging the importance of American foreign policy but redirecting the focus to America’s domestic issues. Questioned by Price as to what these issues are, Patrick launches into a three-part address of political objectives. The first part addresses global and domestic concerns for the U.S.: [W]e have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race. Stop terrorism and world hunger. Ensure a strong national defense, prevent the spread of communism in Central America, work for a Middle East peace settlement, prevent U.S. military involvement overseas. We have to ensure that America is a respected world power. Now that’s not to belittle our domestic problems, which are equally important, if not more. Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education, strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs . . . (AP, 14)

Patrick continues, addressing economic issues in the second part of his speech, concluding that America needs to promote opportunities “for small businesses and controlling mergers and big corporate takeovers” (AP, 15), ironically displaying the kind of “concerns about the ethics of the American business world” that the Times valued in the “Jogger” victim’s profile. In the final part of his speech, Patrick addresses America’s social needs. The inconsistency in his list of points is shown most clearly in the final part: We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting rights for women but change abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women’s freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people. (AP, 15)

Here Patrick shows the impossibility of the American utopian vision, what Daniel Bell calls “the cultural contradictions of capitalism” that Žižek regards in the twenty-first century as the “origins of today’s ideological malaise.”45 There is, of course, no way to reconcile the reactionary pro-life politics of Republicans (Reagan wrote an impassioned

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pro-life essay in 1983 titled, “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation”) with women’s freedom of choice. This speech is important, as the narrative that follows vitiates each of Patrick’s statements, revealing the obscene underside of his political objectives. The list can be read as a simple cataloging of political statements that Patrick reproduces in his narrative, in the same way that he catalogs brand names and descriptions of commodities in the novel. If this is the case, as Murphet has observed,46 Patrick brings to light the schism between political ideology and the actual social divide in American society. This three-part opening speech elicits a kind of Žižekian reversal of previous interpretations of the book, such as Elizabeth Young’s, that point out that Patrick’s gruesome murders are fantasies. If one takes again Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion at the outset of Dialectic of Enlightenment, that in the social whole, the commodity becomes a metaphysics, “an ideological curtain behind which the real evil is concentrated”47 then Patrick’s bourgeois commodity-fueled persona is the fantasy, as is his political ideology outlined above. His murders are indeed fiction but also in fact represent what is behind the fantasy. His crimes, in their extreme subjective violence, reveal the true representation of the systemic violence of the apparatus, both literary and political, into which he has been assimilated, as well as the obscene underside of Republican ideology and the social actuality of 1980s. The indoctrination of society by Republican slogans is shown elsewhere in the text, with Patrick’s repetition throughout the novel of the catchphrase of the American government’s 1982 war on drugs: “Just Say No.” With Nancy Reagan at the helm of the campaign, its aim was originally to deter young people from recreational drug use. However, throughout the 1980s, the slogan became more universal and came to promote a refusal on behalf of young people of violence, premarital sex, and other Christian “vices.” Ellis parodies this by having Patrick use the phrase repetitively’ for example, to refuse drinks at Fluties Pier 17 (AP, 62), and as a way of refusing charity to the homeless (AP, 85). At another point, Ellis directly refers to the Republican censoring of Madonna’s Like A Prayer video that was used in a Pepsi commercial. The American Family Association and other organizations called for the boycott of all Pepsi products on April 4, 1989, in response to blasphemous imagery in Madonna’s video.48 At dinner at Deck Chairs, Patrick suggests Anne has Pepsi with her rum instead of the Diet Coke on account of its cleaner taste and lower sodium content. He reports: “The waiter, Scott, Anne, and even Courtney— they all stare at me as if I have offered some diabolical, apocalyptic

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observation, as if I were shattering a myth highly held, or destroying an oath that was solemnly regarded, and it suddenly becomes almost hushed in Deck Chairs” (AP, 94). Ellis here shows the effect of the reactionary politics of the Reagan administration on the consumer choices of the public, and points to the influence that the measures taken in the culture war period had on American society. The uninformed and conflicting views regarding AIDS illustrated by the Upper East Side characters are also associated with their Republican class and social prejudice toward the East Village characters in the novel. The characters’ attitudes and ignorance toward AIDS mock Reagan’s damaging silence on the issue (Reagan didn’t mention the disease until 1987), and signal the cultural repercussions of the lack of funding for AIDS research and public education regarding the disease in the 1980s. In the Wall Street group, Ellis manifests the myths surrounding AIDS created by mass culture and the media in the period that went on to define and increase the prejudice surrounding the disease. In the taxi to Evelyn’s party, Price pulls out that day’s paper. What follows is an absurd list of tabloid-style scare stories, among them, “baseball players with AIDS” and “AIDS babies”: “Diseases!” Price exclaims, his face tense with pain. “There’s this theory out now that if you can catch the AIDS virus through having sex with someone who is infected then you can also catch anything, whether it’s a virus per se or not—Alzheimer’s, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, leukemia, anorexia, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, dyslexia . . . (AP, 5)

Price’s excitement at the sensationalist headlines, along with his absurd misconception regarding the HIV virus, is the beginning of a narrative that runs throughout the novel that derides the reaction of mass American culture in the 1980s to the AIDS epidemic. After the party, in bed with Patrick, Evelyn, who is meticulous about using a condom, reveals that Stash tested positive to HIV and that she thinks he will sleep with Vanden (thus implying a class distinction in assuming that Stash and Vanden would not use contraception). Patrick’s response is simply “good” (AP, 22). At dinner, Price points out what he perceives to be the benefits of women who attend Camden, remarking: “[T]hey think AIDS is a new band from England” (AP, 33). Here we have a glaring contradiction in Price’s earlier fear of contracting AIDS through sex and his intimation at dinner that Camden women are worth sleeping with because they are unaware of the AIDS virus and will therefore have unprotected sex. In the same conversation,

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Van Patten references an article he Xeroxed: “[I]t says our chances of catching it are like zero zero zero zero point half a decimal percentage or something, and this is no matter what kind of scumbag, slut bucket, horndog chick we end up boffing” (AP, 33). One member of the group responds, “[g]uys just cannot get it,” and another adds, “[w]ell, not white guys” (AP, 33). Their discourse points to the media-fueled misconceptions and the ignorance of much of American society in the 1980s regarding AIDS. But crucially, it also points to the racism and homophobia generated by mass culture. The attitude of the characters is deeply self-interested, showing an unwillingness to see the AIDS epidemic as a cultural issue that related to everyone and that needed to be addressed with action from society as a whole. Instead the characters exhibit how society marginalized groups in terms of race and sexuality, and in this instance, how the heterosexual white male was led to believe because of his race and because of his heterosexuality that he was immune. This produced a dominant class of white middle-class bourgeois young professionals who socially dominated New York City in the late eighties, the ideological super-class celebrated by Dinkins. The headlines in the pages of Price’s newspaper, “baseball players with AIDS” and “AIDS babies,” induce fear precisely because they suggest that being a white, heterosexual American does not equal immunity from the virus. At other places, Ellis references the issue less obviously, showing an innate prejudice in the characters that, crucially, is generated from the media. When Price refers to the cab driver in the opening pages as an “inept Haitian cabbie,” Ellis double-voices the racial stigma inflicted on Haitians living in New York in the 1980s, who in 1983 were singled out by the CDC as a group with an increased risk of AIDS. In 1985, Haitians were removed from the list, yet Haitians remained heavily stigmatized in American society. It is not just the men who exhibit a disregard and lack of social awareness in the novel. When Courtney and Patrick argue about the condom he’s wearing, Courtney becomes hysterical and says to Patrick, “I have a promotion coming to me. I’m going to Barbados in August and I don’t want a case of Kaposi’s sarcoma to fuck it up.” She follows this with, “Oh god, I want to wear a bikini . . . A Norma Kamali I just bought at Bergdorf’s” (AP, 101). Here Courtney is specifically concerned about Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-related illness that causes lesions on the skin. Her attitude here is obscene and reflects the mass cultural insensitivity to and trivialization of AIDS alongside her obsession with designer beachwear. This conflation of middle-class blindness regarding the disease and consumerism relates the dominant ideology of New York

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City to the wider dominant ideology of consumerism in the 1980s, but significantly it also ridicules the media’s tendency toward sensationalism. Ellis documents this integration in hyperbole in Patrick’s killings, continually double-voicing Patrick’s narrative with an awareness of social conditions, which reveals the inhumanity in both the dominant class and economic ideologies. Furthermore, only in his subjective violence does Patrick show a lack of discrimination, as critics such as Young have pointed out.49 The democratic nature of his killings conflates his subjective violence with the republican American values pronounced in the 1980s.50

Subject and Apparatus Within the mechanisms of the Wall Street collective, Ellis reveals Žižek’s formulation of the systemic violence of capitalist ideology: [I]t is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely objective, systemic, anonymous.51

The Wall Street collective in the novel can be read as an Althusserian social formation that arises from the dominant mode of production of 1980s capitalism. According to Louis Althusser,52 “[i]n order to exist, every social formation must reproduce the conditions of its production at the same time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce.”53 Thus, it must reproduce both the productive forces and the existing relations of production. The constant confusion of identity of the characters in the Wall Street collective and the implication that each character is a double of the other reflect the mechanisms of their social formation. In minutiae, they reflect and act as a miseen-abyme of the larger structure and mechanism of the 1980s’ cultural apparatus. As an ideological state apparatus (ISA), the cultural infrastructure aims toward the same result as all other ISAs: “[T]he reproduction of the relations of production, i.e., of capitalist relations of exploitation.”54 As capitalists, the characters are, in Althusser’s analysis, “agents of exploitation.”55 Yet while they indeed function as agents of exploitation, they are also exploited by the silent ISA to which they have a relationship of servitude. The doubling structures in American Psycho reveal the reproduction of the relations of

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production in a capitalist social formation: “i.e. the relation of the exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited.”56 The Viennese-American psychoanalyst and philosopher Otto Rank, in his seminal study of the double in literature in 1925, analyzed the double with respect to narcissism.57 Examining Freud’s writings,58 Rank comments on the connection between death and the narcissistic attitude, observing that Freud’s citation of the narcissistic theories of the creation of the world “indicate that man is able to perceive the reality surrounding him mainly only as a reflection, or as part, of his ego.”59 He maintains that in the narcissist, “[t]he idea of death . . . is denied by a duplication of the self incorporated in the shadow or in the reflected image.”60 In American Psycho, the idea of the double is represented hyperbolically in imitative relations among the characters who are unaware of their exact likeness. This substitutive affiliation is particularly borne out in the identical descriptions of Patrick and Price and Evelyn and Courtney in the opening scene at Evelyn’s dinner party. As Price and Patrick enter Evelyn’s brownstone apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Patrick reports: “I shiver and hand her my black wool Giorgio Armani overcoat and she takes it from me, carefully airkissing my right cheek, she then performs the same exact movements on Price while taking his Armani overcoat” (AP, 8). Similarly, “Courtney opens the door and she’s wearing a Krizia cream silk blouse, a Krizia rust tweed skirt and silk-satin d’Orsay pumps from Manolo Blahnik,” and on entering the kitchen the reader is informed, “Evelyn stands by a blond wood counter wearing a Krizia cream silk blouse, a Krizia rust tweed skirt and the same pair of silk-satin d’Orsay pumps Courtney has on” (AP, 8−9). Patrick and Price’s interchangeability is also suggested in the capriciousness of Evelyn’s affections toward the two men. Having initially planned to spell Patrick’s initials in sushi, an attempt at a romantic gesture, Evelyn opts instead to spell Timothy’s as she hasn’t enough tuna to spell Patrick’s. The initial P she creates could be Patrick or Price. Timothy Price’s name itself suggests a binary. His Christian name Timothy means “one who fears his God.” This is juxtaposed with his surname Price, which not only is an overt allusion to capital but also suggests a Mephistopheles figure. This doubling relation between Patrick and his tempter, Price, is mirrored throughout the text in the reflexivity of the dialogic relations between other characters. They are constantly mistaken for one another. At Tunnel Club, the following exchange takes place: I shout out to him [Price], “Hey, there’s Teddy,” and this breaks his gaze and he shakes it as if to clear it, refocuses his gaze on Madison

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and shouts decisively, “No, that’s not Madison for Christ sakes, that’s Turnball,” and the guy who I thought is Madison is greeted by two other guys in tuxedos and he turns his back to us and suddenly, behind Price, Ebersol wraps an arm around Timothy’s neck and laughingly pretends to strangle him, then Price pushes the arm away, shakes Ebersol’s hand and says, “Hey Madison.” (AP, 53)

The doppelganger relations in scenes such as this one and the fact that the characters all work on Wall Street align them with the economic apparatus in such a way that they can be read as products of what Marx understood as the parthenogenesis of capital, the asexual reproduction of the circulation of capital.61 In assessing the doppelganger in German literature, Andrew J. Webber comments that doppelganger stories are rich in the effects of mise-en-abyme, “whereby figures or structures are reflected within each other.”62 He asserts: “The mise-en-abyme of emblematic figures at once serves to repeat and so affirm ad infinitum the identity for which they stand, and yet to cast the sign of identity into abysmal or groundless nonentity.”63 In American Psycho, the effects of mise-en-abyme are apparent both in the characters and the structure of the text. At the beginning of American Psycho Patrick appears as the rational counterpart to his antagonistic double, Timothy Price, who is, according to Patrick, the only interesting person he knows (AP, 21). Before Price’s disappearance in Tunnel Club, Patrick is represented as the most sensitive character in the group. Despite, at the outset of the novel describing himself as “ethical,” “tolerant,” “extremely satisfied” with his life, Price, in contrast to his self-projection, is represented as racist, sexist, and cocaine-hungry with serial killing tendencies. At dinner, Price is asked if he has a GQ question. He replies: “Yeah . . . If all of your friends are morons is it a felony, a misdemeanor or an act of God if you blow their heads off with a fucking thirty-eight magnum?” (AP, 34). Antithetical to Price’s social antipathy, at the same dinner, Patrick stands against Preston’s antiSemitic remarks. Price describes him as “[t]he voice of reason . . . The boy next door” (AP, 35). Similarly, when Preston tells a joke, Patrick responds: “It’s not funny . . . It’s racist” (AP, 37). There is a clear divide between the perceived Patrick Bateman and the serial killer who describes the Chinese lady in the dry cleaners as “yipping,” as “blabbering something in the same spastic foreign tongue” (AP, 80). Timothy Price, in the early part of the book, is Patrick Bateman’s doppelganger, his obscene underside. That Patrick is Price’s mirror image is shown in the interchangeability of Price and Patrick’s speech

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at Tunnel Club when McDermott and Van Patten call Price’s abusive behavior toward women into question: “Listen, you think I act like I do around you guys when I want some pussy?” Price challenges. “Yeah I do,” McDermott and Van Patten say at the same time. “You know,” I say, “it’s possible to act differently from how one actually feels to get sex guys. I hope I’m not causing you to relose your innocence, McDermott.” I start walking faster, trying to keep up with Tim. (AP, 51)

Patrick, shadow-like, continuously follows Price in these opening scenes. He repetitively refers to Price not acknowledging his presence. Madison’s reaction to Price’s disappearance down the train tracks also suggests that Price is Patrick’s alter ego. Patrick reports: “Madison is standing nearby and sticks his hand out as if to congratulate me for something. ‘That guy’s a riot’ ” (AP, 60). In true doppelganger style, Price returns at the end of the narrative. Patrick reports: And, for the sake of form, Tim Price resurfaces, or at least I’m pretty sure he does. While I’m at my desk simultaneously crossing out the days in my calendar that have already passed and reading a new bestseller about office management called Why It Works to Be a Jerk, Jean buzzes in, announcing that Tim Price wants to talk, and fearfully I say, “Send him . . . in.” (AP, 369)

Price’s reappearance is as ambiguous as his disappearance. The fear Patrick reports at the prospect of encountering Price signals once again the master-slave dialectic inherent to Patrick’s relationship with Price, which is also characteristic of doppelganger texts.64 Throughout the text, Patrick expresses a feeling of being erased, of being rubbed out. When Price reenters the text in this scene, Patrick states: “There’s a smudge on his forehead, or at least that’s what I think I see.” Their dialogue suggests that Price functions in the text as the problematic other of Patrick Bateman: “Price,” I say, shaking his hand. “Where have you been?” “Oh, just making the rounds.” He smiles. “But hey, I’m back.” “Far out.” I shrug, confused. “How was . . . it?” “It was . . . surprising.” He shrugs too. “It was . . . depressing.” “I thought I saw you in Aspen,” I murmur. “Hey, how are you Bateman?” He asks. “I’m okay,” I tell him, swallowing. “Just . . . existing.” (AP, 369)

Patrick’s vague recollection that he encountered Price in Aspen while on holiday with Evelyn suggests a possible doppelganger encounter.

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When he asks Tim, “[w]hat’s the story?” concerning his disappearance, he notices the smudge on Price’s forehead but again comments, “I get the feeling that if I asked someone else if it was truly there, he (or she) would just say no.” The idea that the smudge is a figment of Patrick’s imagination implies a correlation between the mark and his own sense of being erased, both in terms of the erasure of subjectivity within the exploitative apparatus and concomitantly a mark of his effacement at the hands of the author. As Price leaves Patrick’s office, he reinstates Patrick’s serial killing persona: “You’re a madman, Bateman. An animal. A total animal,” he tells him. Yet when Price is at dinner with the group in the final scene of the novel, he is now critical of Reagan, who appears with George W. Bush on the television coverage of Bush’s inauguration in January 1989. Aware of the contradictions in Republican policy, Price gets angry, stating, “[h]e presents himself as an old codger. But inside . . . .”. “Price can’t finish the sentence,” Patrick tells the reader, “can’t find the last two words he needs” (AP, 382). Patrick’s response—to be both disappointed and relieved—suggests that Price’s inability to speak out against Republican ideology stems either from fear of the consequences if he did, or of simply, through political brainwashing, not knowing. Price’s disappearance and his subsequent reappearance in the final pages of the text serve to frame the narrative and bring it full circle, emphasizing the final words of the book: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. The lack of an exit affirms the subjects’ reification into ideology as “ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time . . . it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).”65 The words also consolidate the lack of redemption offered by the novel. In the final scene at Harry’s, the reader encounters a mirroring of one of the first scenes in which the group is at the same restaurant, echoing fragments of the earlier conversations: “Did you know that cavemen got more fiber than we do?” (AP, 383). This circular structure of the text points to the Althusserian “endless chain” of the mechanism of “the reproduction of the means of production,”66 that the subject is always within the ideology that interpellated it; for “Price” and his Wall Street collective, this is the ideology of the economic apparatus.

Repressive Desublimation American Psycho opens with an instance of desublimation in the form of a citation from Dante’s Inferno: “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” which “is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First” (AP, 3).

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Another piece of graffit sprayed in red “on the side of a McDonald’s on Fourth and Seventh” simply reads “FEAR.” Sadie Plant observes regarding the 1968 Paris riots, “anonymous, cheap and immediate, the use of graffiti in the May events epitomized the avant-garde dream of art realised in the practice of everyday life. A transformation of its environment, graffiti was a powerful form of subversion and engagement as a larger détournement of the city it inspired and reported.”67 Ellis’s graffiti signal a cultural territory in which modes of radical expression have been virtually annihilated and even illicit voices propagate resignation as opposed to resistance. Ellis represents a cultural territory in the wake of the liquidation of two-dimensional culture in which the existence of a counterculture, such as the Counterculture Revolution of the 1960s,68 is no longer possible. Yet throughout the novel, Ellis’s graffiti is a tool for his doublevoicing via which he underwrites Patrick’s narrative, creating a nonreified narrative space of representation within desublimated culture. His reference to Dante’s inscription above the gate of the vestibule with which Dante and Virgil are greeted upon their entry into hell is a double-voiced marker to the reader. The statement echoes Virgil’s words to Dante: “We are at the place where earlier I said / you could expect to see the suffering race / of souls who lost the good of intellect.”69 Ellis uses the continual appearance of references to the musical Les Misérables to show the heightened state of desublimation and to double-voice his narrative. The reference to the billboard of the Broadway production of Les Misérables at the outset, which opened on March 12, 1987, is the first of many that signal both repressive desublimation in the form of the musical and function to double-voice the narrative with references to Hugo’s original 1862 novel that, translated as The Wretched Poor or The Victims, shows the social injustices in pre-Revolutionary bourgeois-dominated Paris. The illustration on the billboard was taken from the original book and shows an impoverished child, Corsette, sweeping a flooded street in Paris. The piece of graffiti scratched on the stone wall behind her reads “confier,” which translates into English as “entrust,” a marking of the injustice of pre-Revolutionary Paris but also echoing to Ellis’s reader Clay’s Elvis Costello poster and Reagan’s political slogan. In Les Misérables, Hugo unmasks the bourgeoisie; Ellis in American Psycho, as many critics such as Murphet have pointed out, evidently has a similar intention.70 Yet Ellis is also pointing to a mode of narration in his references to Hugo and Brecht; one which, as Rancière observes, points to a certain politics of literature. For while Hugo in Les Misérables, as Rancière remarks, “certainly feels sympathy for the

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Republicans who have died for their ideal . . . the very logic of the novel puts forward a different people as opposed to them, a different speech regime, a different community of the living and the dead.”71 Thus through double-voicing Ellis creates a space of literature that references a literary tradition in which writers were, as Rancière’s observes, “in the business of producing meanings” whereby “they use words as communication tools and thereby find themselves engaged, whether they like it or not, in the tasks of constructing a common world.”72 Scattering Patrick’s narrative with references to Les Misérables, Ellis indicates the desublimation of politically transgressive texts by contemporary society, a trend that began particularly in the 1980s with an outburst of adaptations and the musical phenomenon. The characters in Ellis’s novels, unlike Ellis’s reader, have no recognition of the political force of Hugo’s novel; the musical desublimates Hugo’s novel into a harmless sentimental narrative. More barbarously, the characters in American Psycho derive pleasure from watching the suffering of the working classes in the musical,73 which by its multiple reappearances, is shown to be a fetishized commodity in the novel. The emergence of an elderly homeless woman behind a Threepenny Opera poster at a deserted bus stop toward the end of the novel aligns desublimation, materialism, and the loss of radical expression therein with the sociosymbolic violence the homeless woman is representative of. The reference to the desublimated musical of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, first staged in 1928, alerts the informed reader to Brecht’s Marxist attack on bourgeois morality and capitalist property rights as well as his notion of a paradise city, a failed utopia that he encrypted as “Mahagonny” to describe Bavaria after Hitler’s attempted seizure of Bavaria in 1924. Ellis’s reference to Brecht extends in the novel to the detective whom Ellis names Donald Kimball, an allusion to the Reverend Kimball in The Threepenny Opera. Yet there is a further irony in Ellis’s pointing to Brecht, for as Rancière states, in terms of the cultural reception of his theater, “Brecht never stopped missing his mark” and in particular, The Threepenny Opera “delighted those it hoped to thrash.”74 To the reader, Ellis is double-voicing the narrative, pointing via the reference to Hugo’s novel and Brecht’s play both to a politics of literature and to Ellis’s other topography of the socially disaffected groups in New York City in the 1980s, which exist in juxtaposition to the collective of Wall Street. American Psycho also references Hugo’s novel in its structure. Hugo’s novel was divided into 365 short chapters, with three important lengthy digressions on the religious order in France in 1862, the argot (the Paris suburbs), and a retelling of

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the battle of Waterloo. American Psycho, divided into 60 short chapters, also has three dense and significant digressions: on the eighties band Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News. In appropriating Hugo’s text in its structure, American Psycho itself is desublimating Hugo’s novel. Yet it is a subversive desublimation. Ellis reverses Hugo’s story of redemption in Patrick Bateman’s murders that escalate as the narrative progresses. His Wall Street subjects are the opposite of Hugo’s economically dispossessed. The reference then to “the wretched ones” or “the victims” refers to the financially dispossessed groups that the Wall Street collective dominate and harass in the novel. However, it also refers to the Wall Street collective, dispossessed of subjectivity and reified into the economic apparatus. The repetition of Les Misérables reflects both groups. In American Psycho, the process of repressive desublimation is complete. Patrick Bateman, a construct of the 1980s, exhibits this clearly in one of his digressions on Genesis: I’ve been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that I didn’t really understand any of their work . . . all the albums before Duke seemed too artsy, too intellectual. It was Duke (Atlantic; 1980), where Phil Collins’ presence became more apparent, and the music got more modern, and the drum machine became more prevalent and the lyrics started getting less mystical and more specific . . . and complex, ambiguous studies of loss became, instead, smashing first-rate pop songs that I gratefully embraced. (AP, 128)

The intensification of the cultural effects of repressive desublimation is located specifically by Ellis at the turn of the decade from the 1970s to the 1980s. Bateman’s inability to understand Genesis before 1980 due to the “artsy,” “intellectual” nature of their lyrics signifies the domination of a culture in the 1980s that offers superficial satisfaction in the form of consumption of “smashing first-rate pop songs” over a culture that offers intellectual stimulation and hermeneutic fulfillment.75 Patrick’s use of the word “gratefully” in this passage signals his bondage to the cultural apparatus. Price’s initial articulation of himself in financial terms at the outset reflects the advanced devaluation of the individual in relation to the economic powers that Horkheimer and Adorno first conceived of in 1947. At the same time that economic powers devalue and indeed de-individualize the individual, they also enforce the control of society over nature. Patrick’s incapacity with regard to the force of the apparatus is shown in his recurring paralysis that he finds inexplicable. For

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instance, at dinner he reports: “[L]looking up from my plate, a fork poised over it, . . . my hand will not move; it’s as if my hand had a mind of its own and refused to break up its design. I sigh and put the fork down, hopeless” (AP, 48). Here, and in Patrick’s critique of Genesis, Ellis is both employing and mocking Adorno’s cultural criticism. In his chapter “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Adorno asserts: “Regressive listening represents a growing and merciless enemy not only to museum and cultural goods but to the age-old sacral function of music as the locus for taming impulses. Not without penalty, and therefore not without restraint, are the debased products of musical culture surrendered to the disrespectful play and sadistic humour.” Thus, he concludes: “In the face of regressive listening, music on the whole begins to take on a comic aspect.”76 The notion of regressive listening is clearly applicable to Patrick, although Ellis mocks this to a certain extent as Patrick’s digressions on music are some of his most complex and sophisticated lines in the book. Patrick’s amusing immobility at dinner is a clear example of the elevation of the preservation of society; in this case, the design of the commodity, over man’s natural needs to satisfy hunger and the need for nourishment. Patrick’s gratitude at being fed instant enjoyment in the form of pop culture followed by his moments of paralysis and feelings of being controlled by an unknown force are evidence of the subject-apparatus dependent relationship in which “even though the individual disappears before the apparatus which he serves, that apparatus provides for him as never before.”77 The 1980s saw the escalation of this phenomenon. In what Horkheimer and Adorno call the “unjust state of life,” there is a direct growth relation between the impotence and the pliability of the masses and the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them. The Wall Street collective are at once part of mass culture but are also those who dominate socially. They express hatred to those that differ from them socially and economically. This hatred, which the Frankfurt School observed in fascism, is linked to the subjects’ inability to be satisfied sexually or economically.78 American Psycho takes this growth relation to its alarming conclusion —the total erasure of the individual, the reification of the individual not “before” the apparatus he serves but within the apparatus he serves to the point that, for Patrick, “individuality is no longer an issue” (AP, 360). Patrick’s surface narrative is the acute contemporary form of Marcuse’s one-dimensionality. Patrick and his alter egos are trapped within that which Marcuse termed “the apparently impregnable fortress of corporate capitalism.”79 This produces an ideological

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apparatus, which Žižek reads in Lacanian terms as trapping the subject in a “symbolic ideological deadlock.”80 The subjects in Ellis’s American Psycho and Glamorama have become “objects of total administration” in a society that “sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society.”81 Ellis’s Wall Street can be viewed as Marcuse’s model of repressive productivity in its extreme form, and a prototype of Adorno’s notion of “total reification” in which, as Bewes points out, “the subjectivity of men and women is completely dominated by consumer society, removing the possibility even of subjective, interior resistance.”82 “Vital needs” (“nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture”83) have not been replaced by false needs but have instead been perverted and transformed into false needs, thereby effectively eliminating any possible recuperation of the true ones. False needs, Marcuse asserts, “are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice.” He argues: “Most of the prevailing needs to relax, have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.”84 Governed by these false needs, the characters in American Psycho exhibit a dialectic of alienation. In the contemporary condition of repressive desublimation, which Žižek sees as characteristic of postliberal societies, “the triumphant archaic urges, the victory of the Id over the Ego, live in harmony with the triumph of the society over the individual.”85 Alienation is paradoxical: the individual is at once alienated yet imprisoned by the apparatus of domination. Marcuse expresses this when he recognizes the rational character of advanced industrial society’s irrationality: Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.86

Ellis’s subjects in American Psycho are in a state of “voluntary servitude,” “voluntary,” Marcuse explains, “inasmuch as it is introjected into the individuals.”87 Destroying themselves through satisfying

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their needs, they represent the individual who reproduces “through his aspirations and his satisfactions, his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude.”88 American Psycho manifests such dependence through satirizing the Marxist notion of object fetishism and the trends toward onedimensional thought inherent to Reaganism in the 1980s. Patrick is the embodiment of Marcuse’s “second nature of man.” Created from the politics of corporate capitalism, this second nature “ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form.”89 Patrick’s endless cataloging of his possessions marks an excessive identification of the subject with the commodity. His hyperbolic object fetishism is not confined to his obsessive detailing of clothes, gadgets, and facial products. He constantly refers to women as “hardbodies.” The use of such terminology reflects the extent of his reduction of the female form to an onanistic object. The reduction of the women to commodities is an effect of desublimation. As Marcuse observes: “[A]dvanced industrial civilization operates with a greater degree of sexual freedom—‘operates’ in the sense that the latter becomes a market value and a factor of social mores.” 90 The integration of sex into work and public relations “is thus made more susceptible to controlled satisfaction” and becomes “gratifying to the managed individuals. Just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.” 91 Women in American Psycho exist as commodities, in which role, crucially, they also exert an economic demand. When Patrick tells Tim that he’s going out with Courtney, Luis Carruther’s girlfriend, Tim remarks that he may as well hire someone from an escort agency. Patrick inquires why, and Tim answers: “Because she’s gonna cost you a lot more to get laid . . . Meredith’s the same way. She expects to be paid. They all do” (AP, 54−55). The relations between men and women are exchange relations, characterized by elements of commodity fetishism. As an extension of this, an analogy can be drawn between the relations of servitude and domination expressed by social relations in American Psycho and the domination the object exerts over the consumer. If the female in Patrick’s society is reduced to a fetishized object, Patrick, as a consumer, is vulnerable to the conditions of domination produced by that very role. Patrick’s narrative, in its object obsession, embodies the anticlimactic ramifications of commodity fetishism. Patrick’s desire in terms of the “desire of the Other” is explicitly masculine. Žižek differentiates between the masculine and feminine

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forms of desire, positing that the masculine version is essentially characterized as envy and competition: “I want it because you want it, in so far as you want it”—that is to say what confers the desirability of an object is that it is already desired by another. The aim here is the ultimate destruction of the Other, which, of course, then renders the object worthless—therein lies the paradox of the male dialectic of desire.92

This paradox makes itself manifest in multiple scenarios in American Psycho. Culturally it is symptomatic of the “institutionalization of envy” 93 that Žižek sees as functioning in capitalism today. It underlies the constant girlfriend swapping of the characters. It is hinted at in the text that Tim Price is having an affair with Patrick’s girlfriend, Evelyn. Meanwhile, Patrick is having an affair with Luis Carruther’s girlfriend, Courtney. In bed with Courtney, Patrick describes being “spurred on by her disgust for her wimp boyfriend.” Courtney has asked if the condom has a receptacle tip. Patrick, comically deluded by envy and resentment, hears: “Luis is a despicable twit” (AP, 99). Patrick also dates Marcus Halberstam’s girlfriend, Cecelia Wagner (AP, 112). In this process, the women are reduced to commodities, objects of exchange, status symbols, and acquisitions that act as catalysts for the men’s competitiveness. René Girard’s idea of triangulated desires in his seminal work Desire, Deceit and the Novel (1961) is significant here and provides a spatial metaphor for the relations between subject, object, and mediator in the text. Discussing Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Girard remarks that in most works of fiction, desire is always spontaneous and it can be portrayed by a simple line between subject and object. While the straight line is present in Don Quixote, Girard remarks that it is not essential. The reason for this is the presence of a mediator: “The mediator is there above that line, radiating towards both the subject and the object.” 94 The spatial metaphor that expresses this triple relationship is the triangle. Girard asserts that in Don Quixote, “[t]he object changes with each adventure but the triangle remains.” This “structural geometry” is applicable to American Psycho and Ellis’s practice of double-voicing within the narrative. The mediator above the line between subject and object is Ellis, but it is a position Ellis also shares with Marcuse’s powers of domination. Thus the structural relations within the text are double-voiced by the structure of the narrative itself. The triangulated structure of double-voicing in Ellis’s text, whereby Ellis as author is positioned above the line that links

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subject with object, parallels the apparatus of domination whereby the forces of capitalist domination are positioned above the line that links subject with object in one-dimensional culture. Thus the triangulated relations of domination and servitude between author and narrator parallel the relations of domination and servitude in latecapitalist society. Through imposing this narratological structure in the text, Ellis mirrors the oppression of the mediating agency in the one-dimensional culture that his texts operate in. The fact that the object of Patrick’s desire is protean, like Don Quixote’s, is shown through Patrick displaying an envy similar to that he shows toward women with regard to his work. Throughout the narrative, he has a fanatical preoccupation with “Paul Owen’s mysterious Fisher account” (AP, 170), an obsession that leads to Patrick murdering Owen. The covetousness of Patrick’s desire, significantly, is most explicit in the scene in which the characters exchange business cards (AP, 42−43). One by one, the men show their business cards to one another during dinner. Comparing his card with Van Patten’s, Patrick is consumed with jealousy: “I’m looking at Van Patten’s card, then at mine and cannot believe that Price actually likes Van Patten’s better.” When Price “pulls his out of an inside coat pocket,” Patrick’s response is “[e]ven I have to admit it’s magnificent.” Finally, fixated by Montgomery’s card, the last and most impressive, Patrick describes fingering it, in homoerotic terms, “for the sensation the card gives off” to the pads of his fingers. Indeed, American Psycho lends itself at many times to a queer theory reading, this instance being one of the most obvious examples of Patrick’s possible repressed homosexuality.95 This is manifested not only in his jealousy that Price prefers Van Patten’s card to his, but also in his erotic description of the cards made of “bone” and details such as the “tasteful thickness” of Montgomery’s card. The business cards can be viewed in this scene as homoerotic/homosocial objects of desire. In terms of Marxist reification, it is the homosocial implications that are important. When Price intimates that Patrick is jealous, Patrick hands back the card flippantly but reports: “I’m finding it hard to swallow” and expresses profound relief when “Montgomery’s card is placed away, out of sight, back in Timothy’s pocket” (AP, 43). What is found here is a direct exemplification of the links between the masculine form of desire and commodity fetishism: a clear elevation of the business card to the status of the Marxist fetishized object. In presenting his own business card to the group, Patrick expected to be the recipient of envy from his companions. However, in being upstaged, he experiences something similar to coitus interruptus; that which he

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envisages to promise a moment of climax in fact results in the withdrawal of the moment of pleasure, a moment of failure and consequent humiliation. Montgomery’s card, the most impressive and venerated object to Patrick, produces desire, tantamount to physical desire, and at the same time evokes an irrational fear curbed only by its disappearance from his sight. The movement from Patrick’s card as the desired object (and thus correlatively from Patrick as the desired object) to Patrick as the desiring subject, is illuminated further if the scene is viewed in terms of the psychoanalytic phobic object. Clearly, for Patrick, Montgomery’s card, in its ability to simultaneously arouse his desire and repel him, shifts between the two opposite poles of fetish and phobic object. Žižek comments that within the domain of psychoanalysis: [T]his ambiguity of the object which involves the reference to the two lacks becomes visible in the guise of the opposition between fetish and phobic object: in both cases we are fascinated, our attention is transfixed, by an object which functions as the stand-in for castration; the difference is that in the case of the fetish, the disavowal of castration succeeds; while in the case of the phobic object, this disavowal fails, and the object directly announces the dimension of castration.96

The transformation that the object undergoes, according to Žižek, from fetish to phobic object, is that “the fetish as the substitute for the lacking (maternal) phallus, turns into the harbinger of this very lack.” 97 The business card’s metamorphosis in this scene underlines Žižek’s articulation of the phobic object as “a kind of reflection-intoself of the fetish.”98 Women, too, exist for Patrick as manifestations of both fetish and phobia and, in his killings and in his tortures, Patrick enacts a reduction of women that inversely parallels the oscillations between desired object and phobic object found in the scene with the business cards.

The Mutilated Abstract Subject To defend against the lack (symbolic castration) that the phobic object stands for, Patrick erects what Žižek terms a “fantasmatic screen.” 99 Patrick’s narrative is a “pathological, paranoid construction.” He epitomizes what Nancy F. Chodorow terms the “psychic fault-lines of masculinity.”100 The bigotry encountered in American Psycho in the characters’ racism, sexism, and elitism, which has been the focus of much of the criticism surrounding the novel, is a satirical representation of the diffused aggressiveness that reflects their own mutilated

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experience: “the false consciousness and the false needs, the victims of repression who, for their living, depend on the repressive society and repress the alternative.”101 Patrick’s own acts of mutilation precisely correlate to his pornographic sexual encounters in which the women are, in Žižek’s terms, reduced to “a desubjectivized multitude of partial objects.”102 Under such circumstances, Žižek asserts, the woman’s body is transformed into “a multitude of ‘organs without bodies,’ machines of jouissance.”103 Patrick’s mutilations can be seen as an extension of his desubjectivization. Patrick recognizes this lack. Standing in front of D’Agostino’s with an urge to go on a consumerist binge in the food market, he states, I’m still longing for something deeper, something undefined to do beforehand, and I stalk the dark, cold streets of Central Park West and I catch sight of my face reflected in the tinted windows of a limousine that’s parked in front of Café des Artistes and my mouth is moving involuntarily, my tongue wetter than usual, and my eyes are blinking uncontrollably of their own accord. (AP, 157)

Clearly in a deranged state, Patrick calms himself down by whispering soothing thoughts, “anticipating D’Agostino’s, a reservation at Dorsia, the new Mike and the Mechanics CD, and it takes,” he remarks, “an awesome amount of strength to fight down the urge to start slapping myself in the face.” Patrick reacts to this incident by killing a sharpei along with the dog’s owner. For Žižek, subjectivity is a paradoxical “irreducible circularity,” a power that “does not fight an external resisting force (say, the inertia of the given substantial order), but an obstacle that is absolutely inherent, which ultimately ‘is’ the subject itself.”104 Again, in Patrick’s narrative, Žižek’s paradox is apparent, whereby the contemporary subject’s attempt to fill in the gap of subjectivity in fact perpetuates that gap.105 Patrick’s efforts to fill in the aperture of subjectivity that he experiences in instances such as the one outside D’Agostino’s and a later incident in Bloomingdale’s (in which he acknowledges “some kind of existential chasm” (AP, 172) opening up before him106) in actuality widen the gap. The void, generated by the repression the subject experiences in commodity society, is incited further by Patrick’s response of more consumption. These passages show the vicious circle that results in the acceleration of, and the increase in, the severity of his crimes—his crimes that are carried out in order to fill in the void he experiences. Experiencing his own reduction into an incoherent being, Patrick responds by reducing and consuming his female victims. The relation of Patrick’s object fetishism and his cannibalism is evident when he

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tries to cook and eat a girl. His descriptions of her remains are grotesquely similar to his detailed descriptions of the ludicrously ornate dishes he is served in the restaurants he frequents. Thus we are told: “[H]er stomach resembles the eggplant and goats cheese lasagne at Il Marlibro,” while he expresses his desire to “drink this girl’s blood as if it were champagne” (AP, 331). The reduction of the female body to an object of consumption is literalized in this scene. Patrick’s cannibalism is a process that effectively converts the female body to a false need and correlatively enacts the transformation of the psychoanalytic phobic object into the Marxist fetishized object through consumption, collapsing the opposition between fetish and phobic object in a way that inversely mirrors the earlier scene with the business cards, in which the Marxist fetishized object became the psychoanalytic phobic object. The oscillation in these two scenes between the Marxist paradigm of fetishism and Freud’s paradigm of the psychoanalytic phobic object illustrates Žižek’s assertion that the difference between the fetish and phobic object is purely topological—that they are “one and the same object conceived in a different modality.”107 In the transition from phobic to fetish object, not only does Patrick deprive the female body of its capacity to symbolize but he also attempts to actively consume its otherness. Patrick’s displaced, unmastered eroticism can be seen as representing what would be the psycholibidinal character of the prototype of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man. Patrick’s mutilations can be read in terms of the lack inherent to object relations, the desire, and ultimate failure, to possess the venerated object, the source of jouissance. Patrick’s homicides effectively facilitate the workings of the exploitative apparatus but, at the same time, amplify his decomposition as a subject. In dividing his female victims into a multiplicity of parts, for example, he effectively increases the number of commodities that surround him and hence his domination by those objects. As a result, the fantasmatic screen that he erects to defend himself against amalgamation into the dead symbolic order increases the threat that the object imposes. He articulates this situation when he describes his homicidal tendencies as a way of meeting unsatisfied needs: “My . . . need to engage in . . . homicidal behavior on a massive scale cannot be, um, corrected . . . But I . . . have no other way to express my blocked . . . needs” (AP, 325). That his killings fail to provide a remedy is shown in his mental processes that become more meandering, dislocated, and perplexing toward the close of the novel. He wonders, for example, “[i]f I were an actual automaton what difference would there really be?” and he describes his “severely impaired capacity to feel” (AP, 330). Patrick’s fear of becoming an automaton embodies the anxiety of the subject merging entirely

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into the exploitative apparatus. He justifies his cannibalism through reiterating the worthlessness of the object he is consuming: “I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing” (AP, 332). He describes the satisfaction he obtains from the process of bodily dissection as “macabre joy.” However, having mutilated the body beyond recognition, any satisfaction he has achieved subsides. In an incongruous passage he comments: I’m weeping for myself unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing “I just want to be loved,” cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer—all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the disembodied voice coming from its mouth: These are terrible times. (AP, 332)

The acute (and jocular) sense of desolation Patrick experiences at this point is directly related to the despotism worked upon the individual by the injunction to “Enjoy!” by late-capitalist society.108 Enjoyment itself, the attainment of satisfaction, cannot be commanded. It is not found in the fetishized objects that make up his world. The paralysis that Patrick feels early in the novel when he is unable to move his fork escalates toward the end of the novel into a loss of parameters and a subliminal awareness of himself as part of the apparatus. He reports feeling that “[a]ll frontiers, if there had ever been any, seem suddenly detachable and have been removed, a feeling that others are controlling my fate will not leave me . . . This . . . is . . . not . . . a . . . game, I want to shout but I can’t catch my breath” (AP, 355). Again, his dehumanization parallels the violence he inflicts on the bodies of his victims. In one of the final scenes of the book, Patrick informs the reader of three vaginas he has in his gym locker and comments: “There’s a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied around my favorite” (AP, 356). The vaginas are literally organs without bodies, reduced to fetishized artefacts of desublimated culture. Female sexuality is made tangible in a physical form. However, far from offering emendation to the problem of reification, the vaginas represent the anticlimax implicit in commodity fetishism. Once attained, the object loses all value.

Obscenity: An Inner Critique As I stated at the opening of this chapter, American Psycho has received countless allegations of obscenity for its explicit scenes of violence,

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homicide, and pornography. An article in Time by R.Z. Sheppard titled, “A Revolting Development” appeared on October 29, 1990, as a reaction to the scene considered by many to be the most violent— that in which Patrick skins a woman alive. The controversy over this passage takes the scene at face value and misses the crucial point that Ellis is critiquing what Marcuse termed “desublimated sexuality,” graphic depictions of sexuality in which “what happens is surely wild and obscene, virile and tasty, quite immoral—and, precisely because of that, perfectly harmless.”109 Ellis uses the desublimated form of his book to subvert the impasses faced by contemporary reified fiction in which, in Marcuse’s terms, “sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression.”110 Around the same time Sheppard’s Time article was published, Roger Rosenblatt’s scathing review appeared in the New York Times, titled, “Snuff this Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away With Murder?” Rosenblatt takes American Psycho so literally that he interprets that “Patrick’s true inner satisfaction comes when he has a woman in his clutches and can entertain her with a nail gun or a power drill or Mace.”111 This criticism only exhibits a facade of clichéd obscenity in the sense that Marcuse defines it as “a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to the expressions of its own morality but to those of another.”112 Beneath this in Ellis’s narrative lies a truer, more socially afflicting “obscenity” that crucially, unlike Patrick Bateman and his crimes, exists outside as well as inside Ellis’s novel: This society is obscene in producing and indecently exposing a stifling abundance of wares while depriving its victims abroad of the necessities of life; obscene in stuffing itself and its garbage cans while poisoning and burning the scarce foodstuffs in the field of its aggression; obscene in the words and smiles of its politicians and entertainers; in its prayers, in its ignorance, and in the wisdom of its kept intellectuals.113

Ellis’s inner critique in American Psycho is precisely to reflect this obscenity of advanced capitalist productivity “which is geared to obscene affluence and waste.”114 In Violence, Žižek highlights “our blindness to the results of systemic violence.”115 One of the modes of excessive violence that Žižek articulates is Etienne Balibar’s “ultraobjective” or “systemic violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism, which involve the ‘automatic’ creation of excluded and dispensable individuals from the homeless to the unemployed.”116 Preceding Balibar, Althusser defined “repressive” as implying that

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the state apparatus in question “ ‘functions by violence’ ”—at least ultimately (since repression, e.g., administrative repression, may take non-physical forms).”117 Ellis manifests this systemic violence in both Patrick’s subjective violence and the representation of class prejudice, racism, and sexual discrimination throughout the book. In the opening scene in the taxi, Price tells Patrick that he has counted twenty-four homeless people that day, and as they are driving he continues counting. When the taxi stops, Patrick reports of Price: Coming out of the cab he eyes a beggar on the street—“Bingo: thirty”—wearing some kind of weird tacky, filthy green jumpsuit, unshaven, dirty greased back hair, and jokingly Price holds the cab door open for him. The bum, confused and mumbling, eyes locked shamefully on the pavement holds an empty Styrofoam coffee cup out to us, clutched in a tentative hand. “I suppose he doesn’t want the cab,” Price snickers, slamming the cab door. “Ask him if he takes American Express.” “Do you take Am Ex?” The bum nods yes, shuffling slowly. (AP, 7)

Price’s sadism toward the homeless man is emphasized here by Patrick’s humane description of him as “confused,” “mumbling,” “eyes locked shamefully,” his “tentative hand” clutching the cup. The interaction of the Wall Street characters with the homeless mostly involve an assertion of financial dominance, a master-slave gesture such as the Am Ex incident above. The above episode is threefold in its tiered gesture. The homeless man offers his cup in the hope that Price or Patrick will give him some change, Price (as Patrick’s alter ego) then orders Patrick to ask him if he takes Am Ex; Patrick does. The homeless man, forced into a social position of inferiority and humiliation, moves slowly away. The master-slave gesture is repeated again outside Pastels when Price tosses a napkin “at a bum huddling outside the restaurant feebly holding up a sloppy cardboard sign: I AM HUNGRY AND HOMELESS PLEASE HELP ME” (AP, 38). Here again Ellis underwrites with the words “huddling” and “feebly” explicitly referring to the vulnerability of disaffected groups. The block capitals highlight the sign and, as with the other signs in the text, it acts as a point of authorial interlocution. As the group leaves Pastels having settled a $475 bill, Patrick comments, “Montgomery’s bottle of champagne is left at the table undrunk. Outside Pastels a different bum sits in the street, with a sign that says something completely illegible. He gently asks for some change and then, more hopefully, for some food” (AP, 49). Again, here the adjectives “gently”

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and “hopefully” are contrasted with each of the surrounding clauses: the waste of the undrunk champagne and the callousness of Patrick’s response: “That dude needs a facial real bad” (AP, 49). And, again, a master-slave gesture of throwing the man McDermott’s tie is considered as a response. Elsewhere, and perhaps the clearest manifestation of the group’s economic sadism is what Patrick describes as the “tease the bum with the dollar trick” (AP, 109) repeated by various characters throughout the novel. Reeves explains this to Hamlin as taunting the homeless in the streets: “how he hands a dollar to them as he approaches and then yanks it away and pockets it right when he passes the bums” (AP, 85). This sadistic assertion of financial power by the figures representing the economic apparatus in the text functions as a trope that reveals the “ultra-objective” violence within the social edifice. Furthermore, the humanity afforded the homeless contrasted to the Wall Street men who, throughout the novel are described as machines, mechanisms of the market economy, stresses that what is being exercised here is the hegemony of capital over the disaffected group of the homeless which, in Balibar’s terms, is a group created precisely by the social conditions of capitalism. The fact that the homeless people in the novel appear before and after the characters spend vast amounts of money in luxurious restaurants, which are elitist urban spaces blocked to anyone who is not in the top tier of wealth, suggests that the excessive wealth of the Wall Street figures literally generates the economically disaffected groups. Like the abject nature of Patrick’s killings, the treatment of the homeless in the novel is unpalatable, and in its unpalatability, it resists being assimilated and reified into a politically correct market. The same is true for the racism in the novel. In “Elements of AntiSemitism: The Limits of Enlightenment,” Horkheimer and Adorno claim that “[a]nti-Semitic behaviour is generated in situations where blinded men robbed of their subjectivity are set loose as subjects.”118 Patrick exhibits the relationship between the loss of his subjectivity and the sadism he inflicts when he confesses to the reader during lunch with Jean: [T]here is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human

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being. My personality is sketchy, uninformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my hopes, my pity disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. (AP, 362)

Patrick’s confession reflects the rational character of advanced industrial society’s irrationality and the social control that the new needs have produced. His narrative toward the end of the novel is noncontingent, as he conceives himself to be; it has no logical connectives. His confession reveals Horkheimer and Adorno’s observation that “the rationality associated with domination is also based on suffering.”119 The Frankfurt School in 1947 was documenting the mind-set of fascism in Nazi Germany. Ellis’s characters disclose the sadism of both the Republican political mind-set and the economic apparatus of the 1980s. Crucially though, published in 1991, American Psycho avoids the problem that Horkheimer and Adorno pinpointed in 1947: that even the best-intentioned reformer will ultimately be forced to “adopt the mode of insidious characterization and the bad philosophy it conceals,”120 thereby strengthening the power of the established order he is trying to break. Ellis unmasks the pathological ideological condition of racism by revealing the “whole nest of obscene, brutal, racist, sexist fantasies”121 that underlie and sustain the official discourse. He decensors these fantasies and gives them a subjective position of enunciation in Patrick’s narrative. Simultaneously through revealing these intolerable elements, American Psycho resists assimilation into a politically correct society. Patrick’s description of the owner of the dry cleaners cited earlier is often used as the extreme example of his racism, and this extreme racism is prevalent throughout the novel. Patrick, for example, refers to a Southern European designer as “some wop” (AP, 187), and he regrets killing a Chinese man on the basis that he believes him to be Japanese and therefore killed “the wrong type of Asian” (AP, 173). Patrick’s anti-Japanese sentiments here are part of a wider antiJapanese narrative in the novel that reflects the change in attitudes by the financial sector in the U.S. from the early part of the eighties to the latter part of the decade. The crisis in Japan-United States relations evolved from Japan’s unwillingness to open its markets and to change economic practices that the United States viewed as hostile to its own economic interests. The Wall Street Journal, a publication Patrick often reads, reported the changes in the relationship between the two countries. Japan’s stronger currency in the late 1980s contributed to the threat the country posed to the U.S. as it was able to purchase more goods and make larger investments in the United

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States. The threat felt by Wall Street is reflected in the characters’ racism. Take the following scene at a U2 concert. The reason Luis has free tickets is because a group of the bank’s Japanese clients canceled their trip to New York: “Bateman, I hate the Japanese,” Carruthers screams at me, one hand placed over an ear. “Little slanty-eyed bastards.” “What,” I scream, “in the hell are you talking about?” “Oh I know, I know,” he screams, eyes bulging. “They save more than we do and they don’t innovate much, but they sure in the fuck know how to take, steal, our innovations, improve on them then ram them down our fucking throats!” (AP, 139)

This exchange, which clearly influences Patrick’s view, takes place before Patrick’s attempted murder of a Japanese man. Toward the end of the novel, Patrick is angered by Harold Carne’s prediction that “the Japanese will own most of this country by the end of the 90s” and blurts out in a defensive response: “[S]hut up Carnes, they will not” (AP, 372). In this respect the threat that Patrick experiences, and the feeling of being erased along with his anti-Japanese sentiments, is a critique of the threat America felt to its economic hegemony in the late eighties and the consequent anti-Japanese response of the American government. Perhaps the most prominent incident of Patrick’s racism is the poem he gives to Bethany, the ex-girlfriend who he runs into and takes to lunch, before torturing and killing her in his apartment. Patrick wrote poetry for Bethany when they were at Harvard together. He tells her the scrawlings on the front page of his new poem are haiku and tells her to read the poem in public. She reads: “Look at the poor nigger. Look at the poor nigger . . . on . . . the . . . wall . . . Fuck him . . . Fuck the nigger on the wall . . . Black man . . . is . . . de . . . debil?” (AP, 225). The aghast and horrified reaction of the couple of the next table hearing Bethany’s recital demonstrates the reaction of the nonbanking world: horror at the overt racism and verbal infliction of ideological violence. Julian Murphet mirrors the reaction of the couple in his analysis of the book by rendering the scene “unrepeatable.”122 Bethany’s reaction is a few carefully chosen words indicating politeness and the need to find an excuse, a justification for Patrick’s racism: “ ‘I can see that’—she stops, thinking—‘that your sense of . . . social injustice is’— she clears her throat again and looks down—‘still intact’ ” (AP, 224). Bethany’s reaction to Patrick’s poem that exhibits an acute form of ideological violence is to ignore that violence and to see it instead

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as reflecting not racism but its opposite, a poem about social injustice. Bethany’s self-enforced blindness enacts a form of assimilation of Patrick’s poem, a reversal of ideological violence into its opposite, precisely because she is unable to apprehend it in its real, unpalatable form. Ellis represents in Bethany’s reaction the participation of the subject of eighties society in ideological violence through choosing to ignore it. Ellis here, in Bethany’s reaction, can be read as critiquing the public’s reaction to the AIDS epidemic and the marginalization of groups by the Republican politicians. It recalls Žižek’s Marxian revision, whereby he states of contemporary subjects: “They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know. The illusion is therefore double: it consists in overlooking the illusion which is structuring our real, effective relationship to reality. And this overlooked, unconscious illusion is what may be called the ideological fantasy.”123 This criticism of the ideological fantasy embodied in Ellis’s novel extends beyond the text, into the public realm that critiqued it. Roger Cohen remarked in The New York Times in 1991 that “[d]uring the editing process of American Psycho, several editors at Random House have privately expressed relief that the war in the Persian Gulf has distracted attention from the book. One said ‘American Psycho will be published in March, or when the land war starts.’ ”124 The editors here make an important point. Only an event such as the Persian Gulf War, subjective violence on the scale of international conflict, could detract critical attention away from the subjective violence of American Psycho. Ellis’s critics and the American public of the 1980s can be read as exhibiting “the hypocrisy of those who, while combating subjective violence, commit systemic violence that generates the very phenomena they abhor.”125 Precisely because of their fascination with the direct explicit nature of Patrick’s crimes did Ellis’s critics sustain the symbolic and systemic violence inherent to the cultural apparatus of the 1980s. American Psycho in resisting assimilation functions to uncover and to refuse this invisible systemic violence.

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CH A P T ER

3

Cloning the Nineties: Cultural Amnesia, Terrorism, and Contemporary Iconoclasm in Glamorama

The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle) “The photo exists.” (G, 65)

“The ’90s are honest, straightforward. Let’s reflect that,” Victor says, moving around Damien’s new club at the outset of Glamorama. “I want something unconsciously classic. I want no distinctions between exterior and interior, formal and casual, wet and dry, black and white, full and empty” (G, 51). Victor’s vision for Damien’s club neatly articulates in miniature the image culture of the 1990s in which he moves, whereby one-dimensional forces have erased dialectical oppositions between the literal and figurative, reality and illusion. In chapter two, I argued that Bateman’s narrative exhibited the object fetishism of the 1980s and that American Psycho functions as a refusal from within the commodity object and thus effectively resists reification from within the reified object. Victor’s narrative is the voice of the spectacle of 1990s popular culture, which according to Andrew Gibson, from the late 1990s started “steadily invading or hoovering up its principal rival domains.”1 It is in Glamorama that Ellis most sharply critiques the postmodernist renunciation of the philosophical discrimination between essence and appearance. I suggest in the first part of this chapter that Ellis’s move from the 1980s to the 1990s is correspondingly a transition

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from a culture typified by object fetishism to a culture manifested by image fetishism. This documentation of the shift in cultural ideology shows an intensifying of the effects of desublimation. Žižek remarks that the desublimatory process “does not invite a liberating reflection that enables the subject to appropriate his repressed content.”2 On the contrary, in the process of repressive desublimation, psychology is “surpassed through a direct ‘socialization’ of the unconscious.”3 Ignorant, with a narcissistic proclivity for mirrors that eliminates his ability to self-reflect in an ontological sense, this chapter argues that Victor Ward, “the It Boy of the moment” (G, 54), illustrates this socialization of the unconscious in an extreme form. This process produces in Victor a variation of what Roger Luckhurst has termed the amnesic “gapped subject” of “traumaculture.” The symbolic violence that image culture inflicts on the subject in this way produces a trauma. “Trauma,” Luckhurst claims, “is that which cannot be processed by the psyche yet lodges within the self as a foreign body, dictating its processes and behaviour in opaque and alarming ways.”4 Luckhurst’s assertion that “[t]o organize an identity around trauma . . . is to premise it on exactly that which escapes the subject, on an absence or a gap,” describes precisely the absence encountered in the narrative of Victor, whose identity is organized around the image. “This gapped subject,” Luckhurst explains, “is not memorial but amnesiac, not aggregated ‘vertically’ . . . but dispersed ‘horizontally’ in various forms of dissociation.” The structure of Victor’s narrative reflects his status as a gapped subject, of which Luckhurst remarks: “It cannot remember itself to itself; it has no cohesive narrative, only fragments loosely linked through ominous occlusions.”5 The second part of this chapter argues that the cultural amnesia of 1990s society facilitates the international terrorist ring that colonizes the consciousness of the gapped subject of fashion traumaculture with a radical consciousness. Both the author, through double-voicing, and the terrorists, through cloning, infiltrate Victor’s narrative. Glamorama continually undercuts its surface narrative, revealing the antithesis of Victor’s “honest, straightforward decade.” The novel’s structure, through the double-voicing of the narrator, reveals both the violence of symbolization, in Victor’s depersonalization, and the consequent liability of the gapped, depersonalized subject of 1990s culture to colonization by terrorist forces. Guy Debord argued that by means of the spectacle, “[t]he ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise,”6 and this discourse is reflected in the solipsistic narrative of Victor. Ellis radically underwrites the ideology and spectacle of image culture through aligning the terrorists’ interests

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in the novel with situationism and cloning. Through this critical process, Ellis enacts a critique of body commerce. This chapter concludes that through implying that the colonization of the model body takes place by a force that strives toward hermeneutic recuperation, and thus evades the political powers of containment, the goal of Ellis’s terrorists, and indeed the novelist, is to negate the spectacle of 1990s culture.

1990s Image Culture, or, the Spectacle of Death In Glamorama, Ellis moves from a focus on the effects of commodity fetishism upon the contemporary subject to a consideration of an entire image-dominated culture. The idea of the “image fetishism” of the 1990s is closely related to the amplification of onedimensional forces in Glamorama. The fetishization of the fashion models by image culture is paradigmatic of the process of disembodiment by which the image, in Baudrillardian terms, assumes “this power of fascination” so that “it becomes a medium of pure objectality” and consequently “transparent to a form of more subtle seduction.” 7 The banalization of the image that takes place in media society in magazines, on billboards, and on television, empowers the photograph so that, as Roland Barthes perceived, it “crushes all images by its tyranny: no more prints, no more figurative painting unless henceforth by fascinated (and fascinating) submission to the photographic model.”8 In the first section of Glamorama, Ellis constructs an MTV culture of simulation extended into the public sphere in which this submission to the fashion model and to the image is ubiquitous, and as a consequence, the characters simply “slide down the surface of things” (G, 144). Celeste Olalquiaga observes that “rather than pointing to first-degree reference (objects, events) simulation looks at representation of them (images, texts), for verisimilitude.” 9 This replacement of first-degree reference by representation is symptomatic of the environment that has in recent popular culture studies been termed “the post-Warhol distraction factory.”10 It is in this MTV distraction factory, and, in particular, in what Mark Seltzer terms “the public dream spaces of the fashion world,”11 that the events of Glamorama take place. E. Ann Kaplan, an early critic of MTV culture, writes: [I]t is the televisual apparatus that is partly responsible for the kind of consciousness that no longer thinks in terms of an historical frame.

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That sort of “frame” involves precisely the kinds of boundaries and limited texts that television obliterates in its never-ending series.

Similarly: In eliding history as a position from which to speak, rock videos fall into pastiche rather than parody . . . signifying a new lack of orienting boundaries, a tendency to incorporate rather than to “quote” texts.12

Victor typifies this elision of history in the position of the speaking subject in his desublimated idiolect, which is an inflected language in which pop lyrics coalesce with the subject’s discourse. At dinner with his father, Victor asks his father, “[s]o what’s the story, morning Glory?” This line from a song by Oasis opens many of Victor’s dialogues. Victor’s reiteration of the lyrics signal the rhetorical dominance of indie music and the audio looping characteristic of MTV in 1990s culture. The insertion of indie lyrics into Victor’s linguistic register underlines the extent to which the surface culture absorbs all forms of attempted independent expression within its desublimated cultural framework.13 A little further in the conversation, his father addresses the inanity of Victor’s life: “I lose a lot of sleep, Victor, trying to figure out just what your point is.” “I’m a loser, baby,” I sigh, slumping back into the booth. “So why don’t you kill me?” (G, 78−9)

The use of pop lyrics, in this particular instance, a line from Beck’s ‘Loser’, at dinner with his father, whom we later find out is a politician, demonstrates that Victor’s use of pop jargon is not relative to his social situation. Furthermore, not only in this scene but throughout the novel, Victor’s speech shows no understanding of appropriate linguistic registers. The lack of orientating boundaries and his inability to navigate in discursive space is one of the reasons Victor is perpetually “lost.” Kaplan’s “lack of orienting boundaries” in MTV culture is also shown in the oscillation of Victor’s narrative between reality and illusion in such a way that the boundaries between reality and illusion are entirely blurred. In Glamorama, reality is a collective hallucination. The MTV world of Glamorama is precisely the antithesis to Marcuse’s liberationary vision of the “non-functioning of television and the allied media,” a vital step toward what he envisioned to be “the disintegration of the

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system.”14 Glamorama represents a culture in which, according to Baudrillard, all that makes up the visual is “merely reportage, realist cliché or aesthetic performance, enslaved to all ideological systems.”15 The spectacle of Glamorama is the development of Debord’s spectacle, which he defines as “capital at such a degree of accumulation that it becomes image.”16 In 1967, Debord envisaged the society of the spectacle to be one in which “the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making.”17 The spectacle of the 1990s is an extreme social surface, which Victor refers to as his “pseudo reality,” a temporal hallucination made up of pseudo-cyclical moments such as the one Victor records at the Todd Oldham show: Orlando Pita has done the girls’ hair and we’re all definitely opting for semi-understatement here and pearly cream pink eye shadow, upper lids done, lower rims just about. Someone rubs a fake tattoo of Snappy the Shark on my left pectoral while I smoke a cigarette then eat a couple of Twizzlers that I wash down with a Snapple an assistant hands me while someone inspects my belly button, vaguely impressed, and someone else camcords the event—another modern moment completed. (G, 121)

Here the “event,” the “modern moment” is the creation of a false reality. As Baudrillard recognizes, at this advanced stage, “the image is nothing but an operator of visibility—the medium of an integral visibility that is the pendant to Integral Reality, becoming-real going hand-in-hand with becoming-visible at all costs.” Victor’s world, in Baudrillardian terms, is characterized by the fact that “everything must be seen, everything must be visible, and the image is pre-eminently the site of this visibility”; it is where “the banality of the image meets the banality of life.” This, for Baudrillard, is where “integral visibility” begins, “where everything is put on view and you realize there is no longer anything to see.”18 Fashion photography invites image veneration. It creates images that, in Blanchot’s words, have “that absence-as-presence which constitutes the lure and fascination of the Sirens.”19 The iconic status allocated to the image in glamour society is illustrated in the media representations of models in the novel. The most prominent example is Chloe Burns, Victor’s girlfriend, of whom a journalist says, “[e]ven though we’ve never met, she looks eerily familiar, as if we’ve known her forever” (G, 43). The model in contemporary society plays the same role as the Lady in courtly love poetry. Žižek observes that, in Lacan’s analysis of the tradition, the Lady “is addressed as an abstract

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Ideal, so that writers have noted that all the poets seem to be addressing the same person.” “In this poetic field,” Žižek argues, “[t]he [feminine] object is emptied of all real substance.”20 I have placed Žižek’s gendering of the object here in brackets, as in Glamorama the fetishization of the male body into an abstract Ideal is as prolific as the fetishization of the female body, with no distinction between the two. Indeed, at dinner, Victor’s father mistakes the gender of the waiter, believing him to be a woman. Ellis’s preoccupation with the damaging effects of image fetishism is elucidated by the author’s own comments in his interview with Jamie Clarke. Clarke confronts Ellis with the allegation that a comparison between social mechanisms and that which Shankar Vendantam terms “calculated political violence”21 could be perceived as exaggerated to the point of distortion. Ellis responds to such a possible accusation with the following rationale: [T]here’s a tyranny to the fashion world in the way it extols an ideal beauty above all else that I think damages us. That has been a form of torture for women for decades and now it is increasingly happening to men. This obsession with looks that the fashion world and photography worlds have taken to an extreme, psychically damages the culture . . . I know we are not talking about actual violence—which is the terrorists’ goal—but emotional violence. Both worlds want you to be emotionally violated in the end.22

The emptying of the subject of substance is universal in Ellis’s glamour society. All the models and celebrities are representative of a situation where “[t]he individual who in the service of the spectacle is placed in stardom’s spotlight is in fact the opposite of an individual, and as clearly the enemy of the individual in himself as of the individual in others.”23 In entering the spectacle, Debord argues, the celebrity renounces all autonomy “in order himself to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things.”24 What is clear in Victor and the other models/celebrities is Debord’s observation that celebrities themselves are illusions. In Victor’s ineptitude and Chloe’s self-hatred, for example, Ellis realizes Debord’s claim that “[t]he admirable people who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life—and everyone knows it.”25 Fashion photography and celebrity culture then construct what Michael Kohler terms a “secondary reality,”26 a reality constructed

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through mediatized images, the belief in which increasingly erases the subject’s sense of any kind of empirical reality. This constructed secondary reality forms the basis of the surface narrative of Glamorama. The photograph as a cultural medium and its production of a collective hallucination merges with the forces of technological reproduction in Glamorama to present a platitudinous surface culture vulnerable to infiltration and occupation by both Ellis and the terrorists. A clear instance of this constructed reality is Victor’s description of his first encounter with Marina aboard the QE2: I’m at the pool deck holding a towel, wandering round, amiably spacey with rock-star stubble, wearing a tight Gap tank top, sunglasses lowered at the girl with the total Juliette-Binoche-if-Juliette-Binoche-wereblond-and-from-Darien-Conneticut look, lying on a chaise longue in a row of twenty: tall, statuesque, killer abs, little too muscular maybe but the hardness offset by large, soft looking breasts straining against a white gauzy half-shirt, the prerequisite curvy legs outlined beneath leopard-print Capri pants. (G, 195)

The effect of this image that evokes the constructed photographic image of the woman in men’s magazines is heightened by Victor’s representation of himself “instinctively moving into the frame, hitting my mark” (G, 195). When the girl drops her mascara wand, he states, “I gracefully stoop down to pick it up—a rehearsed gesture I’m pretty good at.” This passage is paradigmatic of the ambiguity inherent in the novel as to whether Victor is being filmed or merely sees himself in this mediated/mediatized way. Throughout the narrative, Ellis plays with the two visual modes of photograph and film, and coextensively, hallucination and illusion. Drawing the distinction between photography and film, Barthes states, “[a] film can be mad by artifice, can present the cultural signs of madness.” He claims that film is never mad by nature (by iconic status), that “it is always the very opposite of a hallucination; it is simply an illusion; its vision is oneiric, not ecmnesic.”27 Victor’s narrative complicates Barthes’s distinction, for while he is a part of the collective hallucination of the fashion world, he also believes himself to be part of a film. As a result, the logic of his narrative is both oneiric and ecmnesic. Ellis constantly refers to the unreality of Victor’s world. Victor tried out for the reality MTV show The Real World three times but didn’t get the part (G, 24). Chloe complains about people in Los Angeles rehab who “hadn’t been in touch with the real world since 1987” (G, 133). JD tells Victor, “[y]ou need a major injection of reality” (G, 53), and Victor, exasperated with the

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celebrity guest lists for Damien’s opening night, exclaims, “I don’t care what’s real anymore” (G, 69). At the outset, JD tells him, in an attempt to pacify his anxiety induced by the presence of the unwanted specks on the walls of Damien’s new club, “[r]eality is an illusion, baby . . . Reality is an illusion” (G, 9). JD’s words here ironically echo Baudrillard’s tenet that “illusion is not the opposite of reality; it is a more subtle reality which enwraps the primary one in the sign of its disappearance.”28 What takes place in Glamorama in the formation of the constructed reality of the spectacle is the replacement of the modal existence of the subject with the modal existence of the image. In Glamorama, the characters are constantly posing for photo shoots or paparazzi shots. Posing, as a premeditated gesture, Barthes points out, is the act of constituting oneself but also, and crucially, the act of reproducing oneself: “I instantly make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.”29 Whenever the characters are in public, and indeed, often when they are in private with one another, they are constantly transforming themselves into an inert image. The immersion in an illusion, the focus purely on the surface world, effectively turns the fashion models in Glamorama from humans into symbols. And the state of being a symbol becomes a desirable objective. Victor exemplifies this in an MTV interview. Victor is asked, “[d]o you see yourself as a symbol of a new generation in America?” Victor responds, “I represent a pretty big pie-wedge of the new generation. I’m maybe a symbol.” He pauses, then states uncertainly, “[a]n icon? No.” After a longer pause, he states, “[n]ot yet” (G, 140). In Victor’s formula, the symbol is the embryonic stage of the icon, the status he wishes to acquire. From the start, Victor identifies with his photographic image and the construct that media society has created of him. He remarks at one point, “Passing a newsstand by the new Gap, I notice I’m still on the cover of the current issue of YouthQuake, looking pretty cool— the headline 27 AND HIP in bold purple letters above my smiling, expressionless face, and I’ve just got to buy another copy” (G, 19). Victor reveres his impassive photographic image and asserts himself through this image with its labeling and packaging. This is shown in his repetitively asking other characters if they have seen the YouthQuake cover. This reverence for the constructed image is repeated again when Victor catches his reflection walking up Lafayette: I catch my reflection superimposed in the glass covering of an Armani Exchange ad and its merging with the sepia-toned photo of a male model until both of us are melded together and it’s hard to turn away

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but except for the sound of my beeper going off the city suddenly goes quiet, the dry air crackling not with static but with something else, something less. (G, 94)

Here Victor is drawn to the image and is absorbed into it. The implication is that the potency of the image and Victor’s identification with it results in a hypnotic merger with the image. But the scene also points to an injunction within the title of the ad “Exchange!” and upon seeing the image, this is what Victor automatically does; he exchanges himself with the Armani model, thus becoming the two-dimensional image presented to him. For a moment Victor loses himself entirely in the image and describes a death-like experience in the dry air crackling with something less than static. In merging with his own image Victor becomes his own reproduction. As a consequence, Victor suffers the Benjaminian lack inherent to the reproduction—the reproduction lacks the “here and now” of the original, “its unique existence in a particular place.”30 At one point he says to Nikitas, a fellow model, “I’m in the here and the now, baby.” Nikitas responds, “[t]hat’s not what I hear” (G, 60). Victor lacks authenticity, having experienced devaluation through merging with his image. In Glamorama, the core of subjectivity is, in Žižek’s terms, “a void filled in by appearances.”31 That these appearances are images of the reproduction of the subject empties the subject of any originality. As the here and now of the human subject has been devalued, what is lacking is the authentic subject. It is in this sense that the subject is gapped and thus open to appropriation. Luckhurst states that 1990s traumaculture is “marked by processes of subjective and communal identification with or projection into the topography of the traumatic gap.”32 In Glamorama, the photograph is both a topographical space and the traumatic gap of subjectivity. Victor enacts the subjective projection of himself onto and into the photograph, and in doing so becomes part of the false consciousness and collective hallucination of 1990s society. In image fetishism, the domination of the purely visual is marred by the violence of symbolization. Žižek observes that for Hegel, “[t]here is something violent in the very symbolization of a thing that equals its mortification.”33 Barthes echoes Hegel’s claim in his idea of the “flat Death” of the photograph in which the anthropological place of death is located in the image. For Barthes, the life/death paradigm “is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.”34 This violence is seen in the surface narrative of Glamorama, in which the body is reduced to its exteriority without

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reference to its corporeality. In the first section of the novel, the image of Chloe dominates on the covers of magazines, on billboards, and as the focus of media attention. Victor describes Chloe’s image on the covers of magazines as “her unblemished face airbrushed to death” (G, 43). She is illustrative of the death-like reduction of the human to the symbolic that Mark Seltzer discusses in his study of contemporary culture as a wound culture: The relays between bodies and signs could not be more explicit than in the model body as leading economic indicator (its bioeconomics) and as mass-mediated spectacle (the excitations of body-machine-image complex). The fashion victim has, beyond that, emerged as something of a model trauma victim. I am referring in part to the stylized model body on display, a beauty so generic it might as well have a bar code on it; bodies in motion without emotion, at once entrancing and selfentranced, self-absorbed and vacant, or self-evacuated, the superstars of a chameleon-like celebrity in anonymity.35

Seltzer observes that it is not just the enduring association of death and photography that is at issue here but “erotic encounters with bodies yielding to the inorganic.”36 Seltzer’s articulation of the acquiescence of the human to the inertia of mediatized society lucidly expresses the essence of the surface society in Glamorama. What takes place in the fashion and media world through the production of the image is the transmutation of the human into the inanimate image. Victor is constantly referred to as a “dummy” by the other characters, underlining his lack of intelligence and simultaneously reducing him to a mannequin. Similarly, Victor extends this to Chloe: “I tell her she looks like a ‘total doll’ and she does” (G, 121). Once the process of dehumanization has taken place in image fetishism, the inanimate image is then reanimated through the fetishistic gaze, yet remains dehumanized. It is a process in which the human body becomes part of the abstract space of capitalism. The body turns into both a site for the inscription of late-capitalist ideology and simultaneously the site of the loss of subjectivity. The violence of symbolization is revealed in the way in which Victor perceives the model bodies. He describes his physical trainer Reed as possessing “a body so well defined it looks skinned” (G, 54). In the office above Damien’s club, [P]hotos of pecs and tanned abs and thighs and bone-white butts are plastered over an entire wall along with an occasional face—everyone from Joel West to Hurley Thompson to Marky Mark to Justin Lazard

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to Kirk Cameron (for god’s sake) to Freedom Williams to body parts that could or could not be mine—here in JD and Beau’s inner sanctum, and though it seems like I’m tearing down Joey Lawrence 8x10s on a daily basis, they’re always replaced, all the guys so similar looking it’s getting tougher and tougher to tell them apart. (G, 63)

The photograph and the fetishization of the body in the photograph dismembers the human, dividing it into anonymous body parts—pecs, abs, butts, and only “the occasional face”—their anonymity reflected here in Victor’s throwaway statement that the body parts could or could not be his. In this process, the subject is dispossessed of the body and concomitantly the mutilated body is stripped of its identity. Victor also points here to the disturbing parthenogenesis of media culture, in the seemingly endless reproduction of the photographs, and by extension body parts, replaced on the wall on a daily basis. There is a parallel here between the acceleration of reproduction/ replacement and the erasure of identity, the multiplicity of the object and the subject’s dominance by the object in commodity fetishism discussed in chapter two. Crucially, Victor’s gaze is also the gaze of the lens. His perception dismembers and violates the other characters in the fashion world. He is paradigmatic of the pathological narcissist, for whom language, Žižek points out, “does indeed function according to the theory of descriptions: the meaning of words is reduced to the positive features of the denoted object, above all those that concern his narcissistic interests.”37 Victor details Lauren Hynde, for instance, as “thin with full breasts, long and shapely legs, short blond hair, everything else— eyes, teeth, lips, whatever, equally nice” (G, 84). Here, in breaking up the body under the gaze, Victor violates Lauren in the way that his “[l]anguage simplifies the designated thing”: reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning, which is ultimately external to it. When we name gold “gold,” we violently extract a metal from its natural texture, investing into it our dreams of wealth, power, spiritual purity and so on, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the immediate reality of gold.38

Thus Victor, as a model, is both the victim of symbolic violence yet, as he is absorbed into and indeed constituent of his image, he is also a perpetrator of symbolic violence as is seen here in his description of Lauren.

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Victor’s homogeneity with the image is apparent in the form of his narrative. He offers an account of events that is framed by the limitations that the photograph imposes upon narrative. Roland Barthes states in Camera Lucida, “[t]he noeme of Photography is simple, banal; no depth: ‘that has been.’ ”39 The photograph is an extended, loaded piece of evidence “as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence.” In phenomenology, Barthes points out, the image is “object-as-nothing.”40 Posited in the image is not just the absence of the object but also “the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it.” For Barthes: Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other hand “but indeed it has been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.41

The subjects of Glamorama are the “object-as-nothing.” The image of the fashion photograph asserts the absence of the subject. Barthes’s claim that the photograph caricatures the existence of the figure it represents is central to understanding Victor’s narrative, as his own narrative is a parody of his existence. In Glamorama, the symbolic violence inflicted on the subject results in the ecmnesic condition of the model trauma victim. Ecmnesic, for Barthes a characteristic of the photograph, in medical terms refers to a lapse in memory of recent events. Victor manifests this condition throughout the novel in his constant memory lapses, which he blames on the short-term memory loss that his Klonopin causes (G, 84). When Palakon asks him if he knew Jamie Fields at Camden, he replies, “[l]isten, unless you have a photo, no dice, my man” (G, 115), implying that he has a purely visual eidetic memory. The name Jamie Fields means nothing to him, yet her image will provide a visual elicitation method, which will enable him to recall whether he knows her. The limitations of Victor’s first-person narrative produced by his ecmnesia reflect the limitations of the single photograph which, as Clive Scott observes, “is incapable of opening up any more than an extremely limited narrative space” precisely because “the time inscribed in it is of too short a duration.”42 Victor shows an inability to conceive real time repetitively throughout the

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narrative. Visiting the band he’s in, Victor asks when the last time was that they made a demo. Angrily, Conrad tells him, “[l]ast week.” Victor murmurs, “[t]hat’s a million years ago” (G, 92). What can also be identified in Victor’s narrative is the lack of meaningful symbolism characteristic of photography. Clive Scott highlights the failure of photography to create a narrative space for the imagination and posits the reason for this to be the lack of elasticities in photography that characterizes narrative painting. A homologous rigidity is experienced in the limited psyche of Victor. While photographs, according to Scott, might generate symbolic readings, they do so only “if their primary justification cannot be found at the indexical or iconic levels.”43 That Victor functions solely at the indexical and iconic levels is shown in his complete lack of understanding of any symbolic meaning. In this way, he is also indicative of the flattening out of the opposition between literal and figurative that is characteristic of one-dimensional society. Victor shows this in an exchange with Alison: “Do you think your jealousy is giving me a hard-on?” “No, only my boyfriend does that.” “Hey, no way do I want to get it on with Damien.” “Jesus, as usual, you’re so literal-minded.” (G, 24)

Victor’s father similarly asks him, “[w]hy are you so literal-minded?” (G, 81). Similarly, Chloe asks Victor if he went to college. Victor absurdly replies, “[l]iterally or figuratively?” and Chloe asks, “[i]s there a difference with you?” (G, 35). Victor’s narrative is literal, flat, exhibiting the same restrictions and constrictions that the photograph possesses. The dominance of the media image in Glamorama accordingly is inseparable from the lack of ontological self-reflection that is produced by the act of image reflection. Victor is deprived of his innermost psychic (mental) content. A pathological narcissist and an empty subject, he is emblematic of his desublimated MTV environment. In the manner of reflection that Kristeva allocates to the Narcissus of Plotinus’s myth, we are confronted with a man who “grants reality [to his own image] instead of examining his own intimacy.”44 Victor does not fear the emptiness of the narcissistic void for the reason that he embodies the narcissistic void. He resembles “that senseless man who, wishing to grasp that image himself . . . disappeared, carried away by the current.”45 The inability of Victor to self-reflect is underlined at the outset when Peyton explains that he approved the design

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for the floor of Damien’s new club. Peyton uses the French “moi” instead of “me” to refer to himself. Victor exclaims, “[w]ho the fuck is Moi? . . . I have no fucking idea who this Moi is, baby” (G, 5).46 The line is clearly double-voiced. Victor has no understanding of otherness, as someone other than himself as “me.” Furthermore, Victor’s inability to understand the objective pronoun signals his failure to self-reflect in a phenomenological sense. This is underlined further in the novel in his dialogue with Palakon: “Since you had mentioned that you were going to follow that girl you met on the ship to Paris, we simply pursued a few theories.” “Who is “we,” Palakon?” I ask hesitantly. “Does the third person alarm you?” “Who’s . . . the third person?” (G, 344)

Victor exhibits in these instances the perspectival vision of the secondary narcissist. This passage is unsettling since “we,” being the firstperson plural nominative, does not actually denote the grammatical third person. That self-reflection has been abated by the growth of capitalism is a key factor in what Marcuse saw as the augmentation of one-dimensionality. Glamorama represents this one-dimensionality in a critical form. “Afterthought,” Victor says of himself, “isn’t in this guy’s vocabulary” (G, 21), and in doing so, reminds the reader of the relation between the loss of analytical reflection and the loss of cultural memory. Victor’s ecmnesia opens up a narrative space that is vulnerable to double-voicing. From the outset of the novel, the reader becomes aware of both Ellis’s doubling in language (“he looks skinned”) and doubling in the society of Glamorama. Ellis’s web of doubling is complex. The surface society doubles the subject through reproduction of the image. As I have argued, this produces the gapped subject. Victor is, in Žižek’s terms, representative of the “void of self-referential negativity,” and it is precisely this void that is a space open to appropriation by a radical critical consciousness. As I suggested earlier, such an appropriation takes place in Glamorama, both by the author through the act of double-voicing and by the terrorists through cloning. Double-voiced markers are prolific throughout the novel. This mode of cultural interpellation highlights the doubling by surface society in the names of the mononymous people who make up the fashion world, such as “Kenny Kenny” and “Shoo Shoo” (G, 59). The models frequent a bar called Doppelgangers.47 Victor’s band is called The Impersonators (G, 81), and at the club he opens Matthew Sweet’s “We’re the Same” blasts out

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(G, 104). In these early narrative indicators the reader becomes aware of the double-voicing of the narrative. Victor, as has been shown, is devoid of any knowledge of the figurative. Yet Victor is used by Ellis as a figurative narratological device, through which the author double-voices the narrative. Through double-voicing in Glamorama, Ellis places the reader in a position of understanding by addressing the reader over the top of the narrator’s head. This space of knowledge is the antithetical counterpart to Victor’s fashion world in which doubles abound. The doppelganger is intrinsically related to the narcissism of Ellis’s protagonist. Narcissism provokes Victor’s inability to see. This enhances the blindness inherent to doubling, in that any possible recognition of the other in terms of dialogic relations is eliminated by the fact that, as Robert Rogers remarks, “one’s self is regarded as though it were another person.”48 At one point, when he’s talking to the clone of Bobby Hughes, Victor tells the reader: “I’m not really used to being around guys who are so much better looking than Victor Ward” (G, 267). Yet while Victor refers to himself in the third person, he has no concept of this mode of narration. Victor’s paradoxical conceit, repeated throughout the novel, “[t]he better you look, the more you see” (G, 27, 81, 98, 254), is an example of the author’s duplicitous praxis. Where Victor hears “look” as a matter of his own appearance, the reader hears the injunction to explore. Just as Patrick Bateman fears being an automaton, Victor expresses his fear of being replaced. At dinner with his father, Victor refers to the anxiety of substitution with regard to his career: “I just want to do something where it’s all mine . . . Where I’m not replaceable.” He continues, “[a] model . . . modelling is . . . I’m replaceable” (G, 79). Yet the reader is aware that Victor is being replaced. This idea of the human as expendable is initially suggested in the numerous mysterious false sightings of Victor. The false sightings significantly always involve photographs. In the opening scene, Victor is introduced to Abdullah, a security handler. Abdullah informs Victor that they have already met in South Beach the week before. Victor tells Abdullah that he wasn’t there, but Abdullah persists, reiterating: “[Y]ou were in the lobby of the Flying Dolphin, getting your photo taken” (G, 11). The next instance of this takes place a scene later and suggests something more sinister behind the straightforward idea of a mistaken identity. Victor bumps into a model, Anjanette, and the following exchange takes place: “I saw you at the Calvin Klein show giving Chloe moral support. Which was so cool of you.”

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“Baby, I wasn’t at the Calvin Klein show but you’re still looking very Uma-ish.” “Victor, I’m positive you were at the Calvin Klein show. I saw you in the second row next to Stephen Dorff and David Salle and Roy Liebenthal. I saw you pose for a photo on 42nd Street, then get into a black scary car.” (G, 18)

The two instances are brought up again when Alison accuses him of lying to her about South Beach. He exclaims. “I wasn’t in South Beach last week and I wasn’t at the . . . Calvin Klein show either” (G, 25). These false sightings of Victor gather ominous momentum as the text progresses and point to another narrative outside of the frame of Victor’s narrative, one that runs beneath the surface sliding. To a more self-aware protagonist, they would trigger some kind of suspicion but their significance is entirely lost on Victor. Ellis points to Victor’s unawareness throughout the text. Victor is not simply lost in the literal sense that he conceives himself literally lost. Precisely because he has no conception of the implied narrative, he is lost with regard to the events of the narrative that is taking place around him and in which he is involved. Before the opening of the club, Victor and Damien are engaged in dialogue, while Lauren listens in to their conversation by the door. She says to Victor, “I heard everything.” Victor responds by murmuring, “[t]hat’s probably more than I heard” (G, 132). Other characters’ interactions with Victor signal to the reader the “other” narrative. The following dialogue takes place between Victor and the Details girl, a kooky magazine journalist writing about Victor: “You’re really into this,” Details girl says. “What’s wrong with looking good?” She ponders this semi-thoughtfully. “Well, what if it’s at the expense of something else? I’m not implying anything. It’s just hypothetical. Don’t be insulted.” “I forgot the question.” “What if it’s at the expense of something else?” “What’s . . . something else?” “I see.” She attempts to complete a facial expression I’d hoped she wouldn’t. (G, 57)

Victor’s politician father ironically double-voices the terrorist narrative when he tells Victor “[y]ou just need to, er, find yourself . . . Find—I don’t know—a new you?” (G, 79). These initial markers and narrative discrepancies, hinted at in the opening scenes of the novel, between

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the reception of events by the aware reader and the other characters, and the reception of events by the naive narrator, divide the narrative into Victor’s perception and what lies outside Victor’s perception. There is a productive structural comparison to be made here between Ellis’s narrative framework and the photographic technique of fashion photographer Guy Bourdin. In a critical study of Bourdin’s disturbing collection of photographs titled Exhibit A, Michael Guerrin observed: Bourdin’s visual concepts are innovations in that the viewer finds himself present at a crucial point in the drama—even while having the impression that the important action isn’t in the image, that is taking place separately, before or after, that some threat is looming, that some inexplicable event is happening, betokened only by a clue in the corner of the frame. Are we in the realm of dream or reality? In some unsettling between-place? Here anything is believable . . . Soon, however, panic ensues, because the photograph poses more questions that it answers, suggests more than it shows.49

Both Ellis and Bourdin use the implementation of an eldritch image onto a constructed fashion image to decenter the observer/reader and invite a more provocative reading of the image or scene being depicted. Ellis’s call for further interpretation through the double-voicing of Victor’s narrative provides a subversion of a contemporary tableau vivant in which the narrative is outside of the scene depicted. Rather than the nineteenth-century tableau vivant, which was a living picture, Victor’s narrative is a contemporary tableau vivant, which portrays the “spectacle of death” that Baudrillard identifies fashion and glamour society to be. As a tableau vivant, Victor’s narrative points to what is taking place outside the dead symbolic frame of Victor’s surface exposé. In the second and third parts of Glamorama, the novel moves into a different narrative mode. Victor, having been recruited by F. Fred Palakon to go to London and find Jamie Fields, whom he knew at Camden, boards the QE2 for five days. The change in location from New York to the QE2, from the metropolitan to an environment that is effectively placeless, in which Victor finds himself “surrounded by so much boring space” (G, 189), positions Victor in a situation in which he is not a feature of his environment. Victor’s narrative authority is diminished aboard the QE2 and his delusional perception of events becomes even more heightened. Ellis imposes the film-script narrative on Victor’s, which merges with it as effortlessly as Victor merged with the Armani model ad. Consequently, Victor perpetually

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perceives himself as being filmed. At the Captain’s Bar, Victor finds the cinematographer and the following exchange takes place: “It’s about time you gave up your foolish dreams, Victor,” Felix said sternly, lifting his head. “Your world’s a little limited.” “Why’s that, bro?” “Haven’t you read the rest of the script?” he asked. “Don’t you know what’s going to happen to you?” “Oh man, this movie’s so over.” A semi-restlessness was settling in and I wanted to take off. “I’m improvising man. I’m just coasting, babe.” “Just be prepared,” Felix said. “You need to be prepared.” He gulped down the rest of his brandy and watched intently as the bartender set the new snifter in front of him. “You need to pay attention.” “This isn’t really happening,” I yawned. “I’m taking my champagne elsewhere. “Victor,” Felix said. “Things get mildly . . . er, hazardous.” “What are you saying, Felix?” I sighed, sliding off the barstool. “Just make sure I’m well lit and don’t play any colossal tricks on me.” “I’m worried that the project is . . . ill-conceived.” he said, swallowing. “The writers seem to be making it up as they go along, which normally I’m used to but here . . .” (G, 194– 5)

Felix’s warning to Victor characterizes the narrative that follows in which the reader is trapped within Victor’s first-person narrative but addressed by Ellis in a number of ways over the top of the narrator’s head. The repetition of the tune “Anything Goes” on the ship is a marker from Ellis to the reader to recognize the equivocal dimensions to Victor’s narrative. In bringing in the notion of Victor following an improvized script, Ellis assumes the authority of the primary narratorial interlocutor. The reader listens to the writers of the script rather than to Victor. The notion that this counter-narrative, of which Victor is unaware while yet playing a part, is being improvized, is a play by the author on a mode of realism against Victor’s immersion in an illusion.

Cloning, Terror and Iconoclasm “What the spectacle has taken from reality must now be retaken from the spectacle.” (Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle)

Through infiltrating Victor’s narrative, addressing the reader above Victor’s head, and critiquing the surface narrative, Ellis positions

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himself alongside the terrorists in the novel. One of the observations made by Guy Debord, the Frankfurt School, and more recently, Slavoj Žižek, is that dialectical thought is eliminated within desublimated commodity culture. Both Ellis’s double-voicing and the terrorists’ acts function to overturn the spectacle that Ellis documents in the first half of the novel and can be seen as a way to reinstate a dialectical dimension into the cultural framework. In recent criticism, Glamorama has been compared to Don DeLillo’s Mao II. Peter Boxall argues that Mao II can be read post-9/11 as being, in Benjamin’s phrase, “haunted by the future.”50 Boxall argues that DeLillo’s narrative, published in 1991, “offers an insight into the conditions that determine the production of George Bush’s new ‘Axis of Evil.’ ”51 For Boxall, Mao II reads as an uncanny premonition of future events, “a kind of reverse déjà vu.”52 Yet, Boxall observes, it is an insight also into the processes that have not yet come into being, that are still unseen in our midst. Glamorama also holds a pre-9/11 prescience. Yet Mao II and Glamorama, while dealing with similar cultural issues in the same political period, are very different novels. Whereas Mao II is a spectral vision of 9/11 in the sense that it anticipates the final stage of globalization, Glamorama, for the twenty-first century reader, is haunted by the iconoclasm of 9/11, 07/07 and, crucially, the tortures of Guantanamo. The terrorists in Glamorama are situationist iconoclasts who colonize the gapped subjects of the 1990s surface culture with the aim of reinstating hermeneutic value. They are American and they function by cloning iconic American subjects in fashion culture. Jamie points out to Victor that, due to their celebrity status, “[n]o one was skeptical about us” (G, 310). Victor first meets Bobby, the leader of the terrorist ring, after Jamie Fields seduces him and takes him back to the anonymous house in a secret location in London. Ellis’s obvious indication of the terrorists’ political tendencies is the copy of the book by Guy Debord that hangs out of Bobby’s rucksack (G, 266). Victor idolizes Bobby, who was “the highest paid model for a moment during the 1980s.” His description of Bobby before he “vacated the New York fashion scene” presents a more successful version of Victor himself: There was the famous Hugo Boss ad where Bobby was flipping off the camera, the tag line “Does Anybody Really Notice?” below him in neon letters, and then the historic Calvin Klein commercial of just Bobby in his underwear looking vacant and coughing while a girl’s voice-over whispered, “It will co-opt your ego,” and when GQ still ran models on the cover, Bobby’s face was there endlessly, dead-eyed and poised. (G, 266– 67)

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Victor comments that Bobby’s public relations team was very efficient. It always “pushed the notion that beneath the drifting surfer-dude image Bobby Hughes was ‘alert’ and had a ‘multi-faceted’ personality” (G, 267). Bobby apparently “vacated” the scene in 1989, leading an aware reader to assume that it was in 1989 that the terrorist forces, possibly his press racket, “co-opted” his ego quite literally by cloning him. By situating Glamorama in the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the era that Fukuyama was to conceive of idealistically as “the end of history,” Ellis can be considered as parodying the period which Žižek calls the “happy 90s.” Through cloning, the terrorists in the novel subvert the spectacle of 1990s culture by making the symbolic real. Twice in the novel the terrorists claim that what they do is a statement. The first is regarding the evisceration of Mica, the DJ who disappeared in the first section of the novel. The second is the torture of Sam Ho. Damien reveals to Victor in the first section that Mica was found in a dumpster in Hell’s Kitchen, beaten with a hammer and then eviscerated. In Mica’s evisceration, the terrorists materialize the invisible objective violence of image culture by making it visible in the form of subjective violence. At the end of part one, Victor attempts to convince Lauren that the photograph of him and Alison is not actually real. Lauren adopts a cold disposition characteristic of the terrorists in the novel. Victor brings up Mica: After a long pause I say, “I guess you heard about Mica.” “What about Mica?” she asks, sounding totally uninterested. “She was, um, murdered baby,” I point out, wiping my nose. “I don’t think that was a murder,” Lauren says carefully. After another long pause I ask, “What was it?” Finally, solemnly, she says, “It was a statement,” giving it more meaning than I’m capable of understanding. “Spare me, Lauren,” I whisper helplessly. She hangs up. (G, 174)

In the terrorist narrative, Ellis realizes the threat of technological reproduction in its extreme form. Benjamin observed that technological reproduction “can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain.”53 The terrorists take Benjamin’s comment on the independence of the photograph, that it “actualises that which is reproduced,” to its violent conclusion. The doubling of the models points to an extreme condition in which the technological reproduction of an image is not only independent of the original but infinitely more powerful and capable of erasing the original entirely.

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Victor’s inability to understand is his downfall in the final sections of the novel. Here, and in many instances, his literal perspective prevents him from understanding. Victor’s repetition of the phrase “spare me” in this context takes on a double meaning. While Victor usually means “spare me the details,” it also comes to be doublevoiced, as Henrik Skov Nielsen has also observed,54 referring to Victor as a spare “me” an excess “me,” which is not currently in use or occupied, an empty and superfluous subject, the gapped subject of the fashion world. In this scene with Lauren, it also signals a cry both to be spared of evisceration, and perhaps to be freed, a cry that is not answered sympathetically by Lauren. At the same time, it designates Victor as a “spare” in the science fiction formula, the spare body of the cloned subject.55 It is the cultural amnesia of the nineties, specifically the cultural unconsciousness of the fashion world, that facilitates the international terrorist ring in Glamorama, whose members, after the manner of the aliens in the classic horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956/1978), replicate the victims of their crimes. Throughout the novel, the appearance of white tulips signals the terrorists’ presence as a parodic reference to the film. For instance, in the first part of the novel, Chloe receives twelve white French tulips, which are delivered backstage at the Donna Karen show. Sent by Victor’s double, the card (JD says), sounds exactly like Victor. However, Victor presumes the flowers are from the object of his envy, Baxter Priestly. Later Victor notices a vase filled with white tulips in the terrorists’ house in London (G, 264) and observes that outside the house there is a garden “filled with white tulips” (G, 269). Ellis refers to the body snatchers in section five. Having heard Victor’s erudite utterance, the confused movie producer Bill tells the cloned intellectual Victor, “[j]ust give me a high-pitched warning scream when you pitch lines like that to me” (G, 455). Adam Roberts has pointed out that Don Siegel’s 1956 version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers can be interpreted both as “McCarthyite scaremongering” against Communism, and as “a leftwing liberal satire on the ideological conformism that McCarthyism produced.”56 The clones retain all the attributes of their originals but are completely devoid of emotion or feeling. The 1978 remake invites a left-wing interpretation: as both embodying the fear of onedimensionality, the lack of emotion that absorption into the exploitative apparatus would produce; and also as being symptomatic of the disregard American society showed toward the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Ellis’s use of the trope of cloning affiliated with an

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international terrorist ring can, in the same vein, be understood as the threat of the dissolution of identity in today’s technocratic society, in which the digital reproduction of images proliferates on an ever-increasing scale along with surveillance via DNA, ID cards, and data footprints. The terrorist underside in the novel, then, can be read as grotesquely enacting the violence done to the image in contemporary culture, which Baudrillard sees as “a violence done to the singular being, at the same time as to the image in its singularity.”57 The novel evokes a parallel between the model body and terrorism as mass-mediated spectacles. WJT Mitchell, in his study What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (2005), compares the iconic figure of Dolly, the famous genetically cloned sheep, and the image of the Twin Towers at the moment of their destruction. “The clone,” Mitchell observes, “renders the disavowal of living images impossible by turning the concept of animated icon on its head.” In contrast, Mitchell argues, “[t]he World Trade Center . . . signifies the potential for the destruction of images in our time, a new and more virulent form of iconoclasm.”58 In Glamorama, Ellis fuses these two contemporary modes of iconoclasm in the figures of the terrorists who are (adult DNA) clones of the mass-mediated spectacle that is the model body. The terrorists’ practice of cloning is signaled in Jamie’s seduction of Victor, after which she takes a sample of his semen (G, 264). The synthesis of cloning and the mass-mediated spectacle implies an interdependent relationship between the model body as sign, the technology of cloning, and the spectacle of terrorism, thereby suggesting that it is the one-dimensionality of the media culture in Glamorama that is the catalyst for terrorism. The terrorists enact literally the form of iconoclasm found in image fetishism. For Baudrillard, “[i]n spite of our cult of idols we are still iconoclasts: we destroy images by overloading them with signification; we kill images with meaning”59 The terrorists are the viral invisible iconoclastic force that terrorizes nineties society. Writing post-9/11, Baudrillard, in his essay, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” argues that: [T]here is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent. We can no longer draw a demarcation line around it. It is at the very heart of this culture which combats it, and the visible fracture (and the hatred) that pits the exploited and the underdeveloped globally against the Western world secretly connects with the fracture internal to the dominant system. That system can face down any visible antagonism. But against the

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other kind, which is viral in structure—as though every machine of domination secreted its own counterapparatus, the agent of its own disappearance—against that form of almost automatic reversion of its own power, the system can do nothing. And terrorism is the shock wave of the silent reversion.60

In Baudrillard’s terms, Ellis’s terrorist clones are the counter-apparatus of media culture, generated and indeed shielded by it, and indestructible as a mechanism of it. Moreover, Ellis’s text can also itself be read as the counter-apparatus that repressive desublimation secretes. It is here that the role of double-voicing appears as fundamental to the production of an immanent critique in Ellis’s work, which constitutes his refusal against the state of assimilation. In Jamie’s recollection of her induction into the terrorist world, Ellis pits the destructive effects of the fashion icon, particularly the waif cult of the early 1990s, against the goals of the terrorists. Jamie tells Victor, “I was responsible for the increased suicide rate . . . amongst teenage girls.” She tells him that she was told she was destroying lives. Bobby literalizes this destruction. He justifies his sedition to Victor on a political level, stating: “The CIA has more blood soaked into its hands than the PLO and the IR A combined.” “The government is the enemy,” Bobby states, and, in reference to Victor’s father, he tells him, “[Y]ou of all people should know that” (G, 314). Victor retorts that he is not political, but Bobby insists that everyone is political, that it’s something people cannot help, that everyone is involved. Where the effects of the media in the first part of the novel depoliticized the subject, the terrorist ring uses the depoliticized model body for repoliticization. When Victor asserts his nationality to protest against what Bobby is doing, Bobby insists that he too is an American. Bobby’s affirmation of his Americanness is important, as Ellis points here to a radical layer of the contemporary fabric of American society that aligns itself with minority groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization that are targeted by the American government in their foreign policy. Bobby meets with a Virginia paramilitary group (G, 303) and mingles with a “Belgian iconoclast.” Bobby is also, we are told, involved with Amnesty International. These associations are important, as they establish the terrorists as a force that seeks to attack the contemporary “ethical illusion.” Here Glamorama seems to act as a presentiment of the debates surrounding 9/11 and America’s invasion of Iraq. Žižek points to the hypocrisy of the ethical illusion when he defends Noam Chomsky against Sam Harris. “Why,” Žižek asks post-9/11, “should Kissinger, when he ordered the carpet bombing

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of Cambodia that led to the death of thousands, be less of a criminal than those responsible for the Twin Towers collapse?”61 Bentley Harrods comments: “I love everything but the Americans . . . Americans are notoriously inept at foreign languages” (G, 316), ironically recalling the opening scene in which Victor cannot translate “Moi.” The terrorists on the other hand are multilingual and often use foreign languages in the novel in the same way that they use static to prevent decoding. The victims of the terrorists in the final section are political models: Sam Ho, the Korean ambassador’s son; the French premier’s son; and Victor, the American senator’s son. When Victor asks Bobby “[w]hy me?” Bobby replies, “[b]ecause you think that the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes . . . Because you think that the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman’ ” (G, 315). The terrorists use being American as a disguise, as protection, and, in this way, Jamie’s statement of the terrorists’ immunity from suspicion within the bodies of celebrities takes on a global political dimension, referring not to glamour society but to the terrorists’ national identity. Regarding the bombings in Paris, Victor tells the reader, “[t]he blast will be blamed on an Algerian guerrilla or a Muslim fundamentalist or maybe the faction of an Islamic group or a splinter group of handsome Basque separatists.” Yet crucially, “[a]ll this is dependent on the spin the head of France’s counterespionage service give the event” (G, 319). Thus the terrorist acts are made possible not only because the gapped subject functions as a space that can be colonized, but also simply because of the terrorists’ national identity whereby America has global impunity from international criminal activity and because terrorist acts are always spun in the interests of the particular secret state. Ellis here underwrites the novel with the implication that America in the 1990s could not conceive that within the country, in which the individual is reified into the state apparatus in the same way that the subject is absorbed into the image, there could be politically radical, dissenting forces, willing to take extreme action against the government. The iconoclasts exist in Glamorama within the icons they seek to destroy: the model body and America itself. The dehumanization of the celebrity through the fact that he or she exists purely as an image actualized in the latter part of the novel. Terrorism, like image culture, is connected not only to the dehumanization of others but also to the dehumanization of oneself. Salman Akhtar, in his essay on dehumanization, comments that the terrorist views innocent bystanders as mere “pawns in the game.”62 Akhtar states that this act of dehumanization protects the terrorist

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from what he calls “the dread of empathy (which would preclude his actions) and the emergence of remorse (which would prevent his repeating them).”63 In this regard, in Akhtar’s study, a crucial distinction between the serial killer and the terrorist arises. Whereas Patrick Bateman was afraid of his self-dehumanization, dehumanization of the self is fundamental to the terrorist in that “a demonized self has greater immunity against fears of bodily harm and less sadness over a wasted life.”64 Self-dehumanization emerges as an important weapon for the terrorist. If one then recalls image fetishism and the transformation of the subject into image in media culture through posing and photography, a link between the self-dehumanization of the model/celebrity and the requirements of the terrorist becomes apparent. Furthermore, terrorist violence has been read as a form of self-reverence as it thrives on attention from the media: “Notoriety achieved through such public attention serves as a powerful mirroring function for the perpetrator’s narcissism,”65 Akhtar writes. An associated connection can be drawn between the tendency of the fashion world and that of terrorism to turn its victims into symbols. Shankar Vedantam makes this point in his analysis of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center: By turning Gartenburg and the thousands of other victims into symbols—Atta obtained the power of symbols—they can mean different things to different people. This is what differentiates terrorism from other forms of violence. Terrorism is calculated political violence, premeditated to have the maximum effect on those untouched by the actual attacks. Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert, put it simply: terrorism is theater.66

As I have stated, the reduction of the human to a symbol in Glamorama takes the form of a disturbing ambivalence as to whether the bodies represented are human or artificial. In the passages in which he depicts the terrorist attacks, Ellis dissolves the boundaries between reality and illusion. In the opening scene of the third part of the novel, Victor describes witnessing a terrorist attack on a street in Notting Hill, London. Although it is clear that Victor believes he is on a movie set, the narrative vacillates between a cinematic representation of the scene and an account that is sadistically realistic. Having reported a violent and realistic account of the bombings, he comments, “[w]here mangled bodies lie, the gore surrounding them looks inauthentic, as if someone had dumped barrels containing smashed tomatoes across sidewalks, splattered this mixture on top of

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body parts and mannequins.” He explains that it is supposed to be the remains of the art students he commented on before the bomb exploded. He adds at the end of this account, “[l]ater I will find out that this particular color looks more real than I could ever have imagined standing on the street of Notting Hill” (G, 239). Ellis is concerned here with the politics and ethics of representation, the inquiry into which he extends in his subsequent novel Lunar Park. In subverting the spectacle, Ellis makes the symbolic dehumanization that takes place in the fashion world real. This is the statement the terrorists make with Mica’s literal evisceration and with the bombing: The extent of the destruction is a blur and its aftermath somehow feels as if it is beside the point. The point is the bomb itself, its placement, its activation—that’s the statement. Not Brigid blown apart beyond recognition or the force of the blast flinging thirty students closest to the car forty, fifty feet into the air or the five students killed instantly . . . The uprooted asphalt, the blackened trees, the benches splattered with gore, some of it burned—all of this matters just as much. It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration. (G, 298)

The “decoration” referred to in this passage is figured throughout the novel in the appearance of confetti and the pungent smell of excrement. The confetti and excrement point to the abject decoration of the spectacle of glamour society, which is the outcome of image fetishism. The terror attacks in Glamorama are a desire to evidence the fetishist disavowal that takes place in the imagedominated culture. What takes place in the novel is a tautological reversal of the symbolic to the literal and the literal to the symbolic. The act of Mica’s evisceration turns the symbolic emptiness of the subject into literal emptiness through disembowelment. Yet within this reversal, the literal also becomes symbolic, a social and political statement of which glamour society is devoid. The function of the statement is important in the novel and refers back to Ellis’s opening citation of Hitler’s: “You make a mistake if you see what we do as merely political.” Ellis uses the abject’s resistance to assimilation to carve out a literary space for the terrorists in the novel.67 Through abject descriptions of the tortures, Ellis refuses reification. Abjection functions in the novel as the breakthrough of the real into the symbolic, as a means to represent the unpalatable reality of the annihilation of

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the subject within the symbolic. Julia Kristeva, in her pioneering work on abjection, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), describes the abject as a “something” that is unrecognizable as a thing: “A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant.”68 The abject, she asserts, is “[a] massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness” capable of pulverizing the subject. It involves the confrontation of a border from which, “in day-to-day existence, the body necessarily extricates itself in order to live.” Thus she places the abject in relation to the subject: “On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.”69 The notion of the human as artificial, as the dehumanized object, engenders abjection. This is shown most explicitly in the torture scene of Sam Ho. Bobby sends Victor to pick up Sam Ho from a hip nightclub called Pylos. Sam is another model and the son of the Korean ambassador. He has the word SLAVE tattooed on the back of his hand signaling his submission to Bobby (but also implicitly to image culture) in a master-slave relationship. When Victor tells Sam he has a message from Bobby, he reacts with extreme reverence, describing Bobby as “a god.” Victor delivers Sam to the house, and Sam disappears inside. Victor falls asleep on the sofa until he is woken by an imagined “Action” call. Following the noises he can hear, Victor finds himself at a door that he has never noticed. Covering the top half of the door is a framed picture of Bobby in a Calvin Klein advertisement “looking directly into the camera,” Victor reports, “at you.” Victor tells the reader: “Drawn to it, I run my hand along the glass it’s encased in” (G, 282). Here Victor is mesmerized by Bobby’s “look.” This “look” is doublevoiced. Bobby is at once the spectacle and the one who turns Victor into an object through his look. The look, Barthes claims, elides the vision, it seems held back by something interior. Yet, he observes, the look is directed at nothing: “It is always potentially crazy: it is at once the effect of truth and the effect of madness.”70 The difference between looking and seeing becomes apparent as the novel unravels and Victor is forced to witness scenes of abject torture. Bobby’s motto “Seeing is believing” is antithetical to Victor’s mantra “[t]he better you look, the more you see”: Victor confuses the narcissistic gaze and the gaze of the photographic model with perception, whereas Bobby’s notion of seeing is equated with perceiving things beyond the spectacle, seeing things as they really are. Victor descends underground and is drawn helplessly to yet another image of Bobby on the wall. He enters a room in which a figure is

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being tortured. Bobby is wearing a ski mask screaming in Japanese at the figure on the table: [A] mannequin made from wax covered in either oil or Vaseline, slathered with it, lies twisted on its back in some kind of horrible position on the steel examination table, naked, both legs spread open and chained to stirrups, its scrotum and anus completely exposed, both arms locked behind its head, which is held up by a rope connected to a hook in the ceiling. (G, 283)

Victor describes being “shocked at how gruesome and inauthentic the waxwork looks.” He believes the airbrushed fashion image to be authentic, whereas from his perspective, the human body looks abject and inauthentic. The true horror of the scene arises from the realization that the mannequin is Sam Ho. The uncanny, in this instance, assumes the form of a mannequin turning human as opposed to the human becoming mannequin that is witnessed throughout Glamorama in the dehumanization of the characters. This reversal is fundamental. Consider the torture scene, which momentarily distances the reader from the represented space: The mannequin springs grotesquely to life in the freezing room, screeching, arching its body up, again and again, lifting itself off the examination table, tendons in its neck straining, and purple foam starts pouring out of its anus, which also has a wire, larger, thicker, inserted into it. Bunched around the wheels on the table legs are white towels spotted heavily with blood, some of it black. What looks like an intestine is slowly emerging of its own accord, from another, wider slit across the mannequin’s belly. (G, 283)

Although the reader is subsequently made aware of the fact that the figure on the torture table is human, the image retained in the reader’s mind is the initial description of the tortured, bleeding mannequin. These abject deaths that occur toward the end of the novel turn the representation of the body in the fashion world inside out. The use of medical language such as “scrotum” and “anus” signal the body conceived as corporeal and anatomical as opposed to the “abs,” “butts,” and “thighs” of the dehumanized body parts montaged on the walls of JD’s office. These images have the direct opposite effect of the constructed image of the fashion photograph. The latter transforms the human form into a two-dimensional image whose constructed beauty evokes reverence and envy in the observer. Now, having set up a world entirely engrossed in image fetishism, Ellis reverses the perspective

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entirely in his abject representations of humanization in the latter part of his novel. The reversal elicits an ambiguous pathos as, even though the mannequin is initially thought to be inanimate, the sense of pain evoked in its torture is ascribed a higher degree of realism than is attributed to the actual human characters in the novel. Another subversion of the surface narrative haunts this scene. Bentley camcords the torture, “the camera aimed solely at the mannequin” (G, 283). Victor’s own camera crew, real or hallucinated, is not around. MTV’s The Real World, the show Victor auditioned for three times, takes place in real time and follows a group of young adults. First broadcast in 1992, it is the prime example of surveillance culture that produces “reality TV” programs. Baudrillard claims that “integral visibility” comes into existence in these programs, “where everything is put on view and you realize there is no longer anything to see.”71 The terrorists’ film, by contrast, is a snuff movie and can be read as the underside of the faux reality of The Real World. It records the torture and the eventual killing of Sam Ho in real time. Žižek’s claim that reality in itself is never intolerable but its language, its symbolization, makes it intolerable is relevant to this scene. The reality of the snuff movie is intolerable precisely because it reverses the artificiality of glamour society: it puts the real human body and its capacity for pain back into the spectacle when this is what the spectacle originally took from reality. In the snuff movie, the horror of what is believed to be artificial is made real. In the Sam Ho scene, the fetishized human body becomes real only at the moment of death and torture. Here Ellis muddies the waters of the reader’s sympathies. The characters in the novel elicit empathy only at the moment that they die, when the reader identifies with them as a body in pain. Only in death do the characters become real. The 1990s saw an explosion of movies concerned with the snuff paradigm. Strange Days (1995), Tesis (1996), and 8MM (1999), for instance, are all concerned with the idea of “live” death. Joel Schumacher’s 8MM places itself very much in nineties’ culture at the outset. Tom, the film’s protagonist, is hired by Mrs. Christian to investigate the authenticity of a film of a girl being brutally murdered, which has been found in her late husband’s safe. He assures her that the snuff movie is an urban myth, sex industry folklore. Tom explains that he went into surveillance rather than law after college because he “decided it was the future.” Having watched the movie, Tom tells Mrs. Christian that “[w]hoever made the film was adept at authenticity.” 8MM shows the underside of surveillance culture in which authenticity and the desire to view real death have become fetishized.

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In 8MM, authenticity kills. Yet, crucially, authenticity is also power. Mr. Christian had the movie made simply because he could. In this way, there is a parallel between Mr. Christian and the culture that fetishizes the image. The film of 16-year-old Mary-Anne Mathews’ death literally enacts the killing of the subject that takes place in the surface world of image and celebrity culture. Bobby Hughes in many ways resembles the central figure of the film, Machine, who enacts the killings and who wears a mask to torture and kill. The film’s tag line, “You can’t prepare for where the truth will take you,” aligns the attainment of truth with death. Authenticity is eroticized in the snuff film at the same time that real death is fetishized. The plot of 8MM hinges on the authenticity of the film. Tom enters the underground world of the sex industry in Hollywood in order to find the people in the snuff film and to find out whether snuff films do indeed exist. At one point, he comes across two films that appear to be snuff but turn out to be fake. The horror Tom experiences while viewing the films subsides as soon as he knows that the films are fiction. Yet the snuff film in question is found to be real. Throughout the film, the tape’s originality, the fact that there is only one, that it has not been and must not be reproduced, is reiterated. The victim in the film, appears only in photographs and film. Having gone to Hollywood to become a star, Mary is immortalized by the snuff movie that killed her; the only thing that remains is her authentic death. Yet she also exists posthumously in the snuff film. The snuff film realizes the anthropological place of death that Barthes ascribed to the photograph. Yet the medium of film adds back movement and the illusion of life. Real death can be continually replayed, repeated, reproduced in spectral time at once paradoxically, repeatedly killing the subject, yet through the reproduction of death, imprisoning the subject and disallowing the subject to die. However, where the fetishized reproduction of the image of the subject, Mary, is destroyed at the end of 8MM by Tom burning the photographs and the films of her, in Glamorama, through cloning, hermeneutic value is restored to the subject, and the image of the subject continues to exist inhabited by another identity. Through restoring hermeneutic value to the cloned subject, the terrorists reverse the Benjaminian devaluation that takes places in image culture. Victor describes the terrorists’ apartment in Paris as, in the style of the situationists’ secret locations, “appropriating an apartment in either the 8th or 16th arrondisement.” He also states that the apartment “has been paid for with Iraqi money washed through Hungary” (G, 297), thus aligning the terrorists’ economics with an underground

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global political economy. The walls of the apartment are lined with Francesco Clemente drawings. The reference to the Italian painter Clemente is significant. In the 1980s, Clemente collaborated with Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Clemente looked to challenge the viewer’s assumption of reality and, like Andy Warhol, was interested in that which Baudrillard terms, “that nothingness at the heart of the object.”72 He also worked with radical American poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, and John Wieners, a further reference by Ellis to the terrorists’ intellectual interests. Clemente, along with many artists toward the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the twenty-first century, engaged with the scientific discourse surrounding genetics and used the molecular metaphor in his art. Clemente’s Silence (2001−2002) depicts an image that resembles the female vulva afloat in a sea of fish that resemble sperm. The outer layer of the vaginal object is patterned with DNAlike strands. A shooting star or a comet is depicted as destined for the vaginal object, denoting perhaps the imminent creation of a new DNA code. As well as the abundance of Clemente drawings, above Bobby’s bed hangs a Frank Moore mural. The reference to Moore (1954−2002) is particularly important to an understanding of the terrorists’ objectives regarding genetic engineering. Moore’s work has a double significance. Firstly, he was a figurative painter; thus, Ellis suggests in Bobby’s admiration of the artist that his aesthetics tend toward the figurative (Bobby’s aesthetic taste in figurative painting accords with his assertion that the acts that the terrorists commit are statements). The aesthetics of Lower East Side artists associates terrorists with the desire for cultural recuperation. Moore was a radical artist and a major figure in AIDS activism in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, suggesting that the recuperation extends to ethics as well as aesthetics. Secondly, Moore’s fascination and engagement with science, particularly his depictions of DNA, the Human Genome Project, cloning, and stem-cell research, further an understanding of the terrorist group in relation to their practice of genetic engineering. Moore’s painting “The Human Genome Project” (2000) reflects his concerns with genetics. In the late nineties, the Human Genome Project caused controversy and excitement in America. A rough draft of the human genome was completed in 2000, and in March of that year Bill Clinton and Tony Blair issued a statement supporting the project. Like Clemente, Moore’s painting operates around a molecular metaphor. A large DNA bank is set against a blue sky. A slick black car speeds away from the bank as a large black demolition pendulum

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swings toward it. Moore summed up the issues that he wanted to represent in his art in an interview with Update, New York Academy of Sciences in April 2002: The human genome project, cloning and stem-cell research are all amazing and exciting—and fraught with danger. They are marred by the same negative motivations that often plague human activities, but also ennobled by the higher motivations that accompany human enterprise. It’s a question of how everyone—the government, society, corporations—can operate to enhance the positively-directed uses of these advances and how we can suppress the negative uses, such as the development of biological weapons or self-serving cloning practices.73

Ellis, like Moore, draws out the complexities of the debates surrounding genetic engineering, understanding the genome project to be both potentially dangerous and progressive. The terrorists clearly display the outcome of what the American government perceived as the dangers of DNA technology falling into the hands of radicals. The practices of cloning that take place in the novel signify on a literal (scientific) level the implied body commerce that takes place in the fashion world. Yet, the terrorist ring clones its subjects, and in doing so, replaces the gapped subject of the fashion world with an enlightened cultural and political subject. In this way, the terrorist ring is represented as an underground radical force seeking to reconstruct the subject. Ellis here enacts a reversal of the normal procedure of cloning. Victor’s repetition of “spare me” signals that while he is biologically the original subject in terms of authenticity, he is in fact the “spare.” The erasure of originality that takes place in image fetishism results in the terrorists’ clone becoming the authentic subject. As Susan Anker and Dorothy Nelkin document, “[i]n 1987, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a policy statement indicating that it considered non-naturally occurring nonhuman living organisms to be patentable subject matter.”74 As a result of dehumanization, the model body is precisely a “non-naturally occurring nonhuman living organism.” The cultural icon of the fashion world is replaced in the terrorists’ process of cloning with the gene, which “for DNA artists” such as Moore, Anker, and Nelkin state, “appears as a cultural icon.”75 The terrorists’ strategy for cultural recuperation can be aligned with the therapeutic practices of recovered memory therapy (RMT). As Luckhurst comments, a trend began in the 1980s in which proponents of RMT claimed to be recovering perfect and verifiable memories of trauma in victims many years after the traumatic episode. The

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practice soon came under attack, however, from opposing groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation that argued that “traumatic memory might be iatrogenic, the product of the very therapy used to treat it.”76 The terrorists’ cloning of the gapped subject and consequent reconstruction of the traumatic subject of 1990s culture is perhaps culturally equivalent to the skeptic’s claim regarding recovered memory therapy. As the counter-apparatus of the surface culture, the secretion of repressive desublimation, the terrorists occupy the site of the subject overlaid by cultural amnesia. Memory, or lack of it, is used by the terrorists as a political device. The photograph, Bentley tells Victor, is only the beginning of the reproduction of reality. Before he is exiled, Victor watches Bentley create a new reality through the computer-generated image: “[H]e’s adding graininess, he’s erasing people, he’s inventing a new world, seamlessly” (G, 357). The reproduction of the subject is shown in many of the characters in the final part of the book but is shown most clearly in Victor. In the fifth section of the book, Victor’s clone narrates. The new Victor is going to law school. Victor Ward has undergone a reversal from mainstream to underground and most of the characters he meets are suitably impressed, the headline THE TR ANSFORMATION OF VICTOR WARD in George magazine reflecting this. At a party, he has a Coke with “someone named Ben Affleck.” The former Victor Johnson, now exiled in Milan, would have known (and revered) the celebrity Ben Affleck, yet described a giant crystal vase in Chloe’s apartment as something “that someone named Susan Sontag gave her” (G, 143). The new Victor Ward (Victor Johnson) is undoubtedly au fait with Sontag’s radical political and cultural thought. Through references to the intellectual subculture in America in the 1990s, Ellis suggests that the active resistance of underground elements of American culture takes the form of penetrating the mainstream identity by infiltrating reified cultural elements with a radical politics. Crucially, it is to the new Victor Ward that Bill directs his comment, “I think you are controlling the zeitgeist . . . I think you are in the driver’s seat.” The new Victor replies, “[p]eople have commented that I’m near the wheel, Bill” (G, 455). The former Victor, in contrast, describes himself at the end of the novel, in the mirror, as looking “ghostly, transparent” and tells the reader that his hair is turning white” (G, 472). The split in Victor echoes the narcissistic split of Wilde’s Dorian Gray77 and by the end of the book Victor is isolated, decaying, trapped within his image. “How many warnings had I ignored?” (G, 477) Victor asks. In the final pages of the book,

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Victor describes fading away, again he is back in a movie, his image “overlapped and dissolved into an image of myself years later sitting in a hotel bar in Milan where I was staring at a mural” (G, 481). The final lines witness Victor staring at the mural and imagining a cinematic dissolve to an older mirror image of himself.

No Body Here: The Voix Acousmatique A third narrative runs throughout the book that afflicts the cloned subject as well as the gapped subject of Victor. This narrative is the Žižekian voix acousmatique that emerges in Glamorama, the superegoic voice that torments the contemporary subject. It is the voice that is also the director of Victor’s narrative. Žižek describes the voix acousmatique, originally conceived of by Michel Chion, as “the voice without bearer, which cannot be attributed to any subject and thus hovers in some indefinite interspace.”78 For Žižek, this voice is implacable “precisely because it cannot be properly placed, being part neither of the diegetic ‘reality’ nor of the sound of the accompaniment (commentary, musical score).” Instead, he asserts, it belongs to “that mysterious domain designated by Lacan as “between two deaths.”79 “It has a free-floating presence, which is the “all-pervasive presence of a nonsubjectivized object, i.e., of a voice-object without support in a subject acting as its source.” It is due to this lack of attachment to a specified object that it “functions as a threat that lurks everywhere.”80 In the first part of the novel, the characters are unable to assert their presence as figures of enunciation and their failure of interlocution gives presence to nondiscursive spaces: “a long chilly silence none of us are able to fill floats around, acts cool, lives” (G, 108). The voix acousmatique is a voice without an image that appropriates these spaces. Throughout the text, the free-floating voice devoid of a bearer haunts the narrative with one-line interventions written in italics. One of these repeatedly informs Victor and the reader: “We’ll slide down the surface of things” (G, 144) and, “It’s what you don’t know that matters most.” This sentence intervenes intermittently in the first section, gaining momentum as the narrative progresses. The voice remains silent for Victor’s voyage on the QE2. It returns in the third section of the book, initially in a plural and enigmatic form. The first night he stays in the house in the 8th or 16th arrondissement with Jamie Fields, he describes the following scene: “[W]hen she closes the door blackness blossoms out of control and still spinning I’m also moving upward toward something, a place where there’s someone waiting to meet me, voices calling out follow, follow” (G, 264). As

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events begin to spiral out of control, the voice intervenes: “It’s the things you don’t know that matter most” (G, 383). At other times, it interrupts the narrative and appears to address the reader. In one of the final scenes in the novel, when Victor enters the house only to find it has metamorphosed into a den of cave paintings, pentagrams, and victims with bombs strapped to them, the voice reports: “[Y]ou are the sort of person who doesn’t see well in the dark” (G, 414). The voice intervenes at one point to make the reader aware that the film of the bomb that Victor is watching with the director is not real; that it is “a decoy, the agents are on the wrong plane, there’s a bomb on a plane but it’s not this one, what they found isn’t really a bomb because this is a movie and those are actors and the real bomb is on a different plane” (G, 437). The ominous whistling of “The Sunny Side of the Street” is also related to this voice. It torments the new Victor, and in doing so, disassociates itself from the terrorists’ interventions. In the men’s room, he reports “[t]he whistling echoes, and then a voice that’s deep and masculine but also ghostly and from another world sings, haltingly, “on the . . . sunny side of the street . . .” (G, 457). “There’s no one in here,” Victor tells the reader, “[t]he bathroom is empty.” The voix acousmatique is a vehicle for Ellis’s authorial refusal, as it can maintain a distance from the socio-symbolic network. Writing on Terry Gillian’s Brazil, Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen, and Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, Žižek argues that all three of these films depict a totalitarian universe in which the subject clings to some superegoic voice that enables him to elude the “complete loss of reality.”81 To sustain itself, Žižek contends, reality always requires a certain superegoic command. Ellis does not allow Victor to hear this voice. Ellis’s voix acousmatique is aimed at his reader. Žižek claims that “the status of the voice uttering this command is neither imaginary, nor symbolic, it is real.”82 The black shapeless threat that encompasses the characters and with which Bobby Hughes is branded, as Sam Ho was branded SLAVE, is the presence of the intersubjective voix acousmatique. The subversion of glamour society in which the object and image exists without subjectivity is subverted in the voice with no object.

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CH A P T ER

4

Twenty-First- Century Gothic (or post-9/11 Fatalism): Self-Parody, Reif ication, and the Becoming Real of Cultural and Authorial Fictions in Lunar Park

The Paradox of Prose Critics of the nineties sought definition, hunting the answer to Derrida’s question of “[h]ow to believe in the contemporary?”1 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the question has been replaced with how to live, write, and speak in the contemporary? In Ellis’s work, the shift into a new millennium resounds with this concern and brings with it an unexpected change from the first person present tense to the past tense in Lunar Park (2005). As the previous chapters have shown, the body of Ellis’s work is characterized by a desire to document the present. Ellis’s break with the present tense at the start of a new century marks a very different social climate. No longer caught within the present, Lunar Park points to what Geoffrey Hartman refers to as “the impossibility of presenting the present.”2 The novel attests to this paradox in representing the present. However, despite the social conditions functioning to obstruct representation, there is nevertheless always a virtual space in which such representation takes place. Blanchot, Hartman observes, identified it with literature.3 The discourse concerning the denial of the contemporary in Lunar Park is bound to the problematics of representation within the sociohistorical context of post-9/11 America. In the post-9/11 cultural climate, critics were quick to draw on Adorno’s statement made in 1951: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”4 “Our metaphysical

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faculty is paralyzed,” Adorno wrote, “because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.”5 Yet Adorno later revised this claim: “A perennial suffering has just as much right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream. For this reason, it may have been wrong to write that after Auschwitz poetry could no longer be written.”6 Siri Hustvedt articulated the sensibility of writers post-9/11, voicing the fear that the American writer possessed at the beginning of the twentyfirst century regarding language and expression. Echoing Adorno’s later self-revisioning, Hustvedt imperatively stated “[w]e have to talk.” Yet simultaneously she issued a warning: “[B]ut we should be careful with our words.”7 Hustvedt’s words here induce a fear of expression that censors the writer. The statement at once contrasts and merges the need for artistic expression with a duty to censor. Words are dangerous. They might offend the victims of the attacks and they might offend the perpetrators. So with the clouds of ash that blanketed New York in the aftermath of the attacks came a scoria of political correctness born out of fear that screened expression and hung over language. Žižek’s bold correction of Adorno grounds Hustvedt’s imperative but tentative statement as a paradox that afflicts specifically the novelist: “[I]t is not poetry that is impossible after Auschwitz,” Žižek writes, “but rather prose.”8 What fails for Žižek is realistic prose, whereas “the poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of the camp succeeds.”9 Thus Adorno’s impossibility is enabling for poetry, as poetry is always “ ‘about’ something that cannot be addressed, only alluded to.”10 Put another way, in such a cultural climate, the figurative becomes the only possible form of expression, as literal expressions are necessarily subject to censorship and the suppression that the fear of articulation engenders. Many representations of 9/11 fell into the representational paradox expressed by Hustvedt. Artistic representation was considered by contemporary writers and filmmakers as necessary, yet that artistic expression was forced into a medium of social and political propriety and aesthetic restraint. DeLillo wrote in the immediate aftermath, “[t]he narrative ends in the rubble and it is left for us to create the counternarrative.”11 Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006) are examples of the American writer’s aesthetically restrained response to the attacks. As Catherine Morley has remarked in her important essay “Writing In the Wake of 9/11,” “[f]ew American writers have overtly addressed the figure of the ‘other’ or the terrorist, preferring instead to retreat to the domestic interiors of American lives.”12 In both DeLillo’s and McInerney’s

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novels, the family unit and relations between the characters are a safe house from which the writers can address the external world of post9/11 New York. The 9/11 tropes in the novels are nonviolent. In Falling Man, the New York performance artist suspended from the building reenacts those who fell from the towers on September 11. The figure creates appropriate unease in the central character, Lianne. She first witnesses the falling man walking from Grand Central Station. She finds the spectacle “disturbing enough to send her back into the terminal.”13 Yet through the distance the figure has from the actual event because his falling is a staged reenactment, he also sublimates the literal. The building is not about to collapse and he is not falling to his death. He is a moment, caught, suspended, visual and silent. He is a spectacle of the event, a silent testimony, and a living double of the dying man. DeLillo’s novel is undeniably an important literary response to the events and one that articulates with precision America after 9/11, offering a benevolent counternarrative. DeLillo’s response is also undeniably sentimental in its evocation of the impact the events had on the American individual. Morley’s analysis of the body of writing in the wake of 9/11 views Ellis as part of the group of writers that turned to the domestic as a way to represent events. Reading Ellis alongside McInerney, Morley interprets Ellis as using 9/11 “as a means of examining the complacency of the dotcom generation and their resultant confusion in the fallout,” as well as considering the attacks in terms of “an assault on masculinity.”14 Morley understands the narrative of Lunar Park as a “pseudo-autobiographical account” that documents not only the move to the suburbs and his resulting “loss of confidence and potency as a writer” but also “the theme of adultery and its repercussions for the American family.”15 While these elements are evident in the novel, I approach Lunar Park from an angle that distinguishes Ellis’s work from that of the writers with whom Morley associates him. In the gothic hauntings of his narrative, Ellis uses figurative tropes in order to question and critique the climate of fear that arose in the wake of the attacks, as well as a way to represent the violence that the attacks inflicted. In view of this approach, Lunar Park is perhaps closer to a writer such as Frédéric Beigbeder and his novel Windows on the World (2003). Beigbeder’s novel explicitly reimagines the events that took place inside the towers on September 11, 2001. While Ellis does not explicitly reimagine the events in the way that Beigbeder does, his authorial engagement with the events is similar. Durand argues that Windows on the World “challenges the ethics of representing violence by accusing the American

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media of erasing through self-censorship most of the ‘inside’ story of the events depicted.”16 Ellis, in his representation of the post-9/11 culture of fear and the imposition of restraints upon the imagination of the writer, performs a critique that similarly questions the ethics of self-censorship. A central concern of Ellis’s is the becoming real of cultural and authorial fictions. Writers worldwide, responding to the events, immediately underlined the cinematic nature of the terrorists’ spectacle. On September 18, 2001, British writer Martin Amis stated: “It is already trite but stringently necessary—to emphasise that such a mise en scène would have embarrassed a studio executive’s storyboard or a thriller-writer’s notebook.” Yet, Amis wrote, “[i]n broad daylight and full consciousness, that outline became established reality.”17 Many post-9/11 representations reversed the process of reification of a cultural fiction into reality, so that reality became a cultural fiction. This was a response to the invisibility and the element of the unknown surrounding the traumatic event. Ian McEwan articulated this the day after the event: Always, it seemed, it was what we could not see that was so frightening. We saw the skyscrapers, the tilting plane, the awful impact, the cumuli of dust engulfing the streets. But we were left to imagine for ourselves the human terror inside the airliner, down the corridors and elevator lobbies of the stricken buildings, or in the streets below us as the towers collapsed onto rescue workers and morning crowds . . . It was our safe distance from it that was all so horrifying. No blood, no screams.18

The reaction to this invisibility in cinema was to recreate the unseen events. United 93 (2006) is a good example of this need to represent the unknown events as apparent realism, despite there being little documentary evidence of the events that took place on which to base the representation. Shot in real time and using wholly unknown actors, the film sought to reenact the events of the fourth plane that never made its target on September 11, 2001. Despite its claim to realism and objectivity, the film severely stereotypes the terrorists and produces a hypothetical representation of the heroism of the passengers aboard. Such representations, in part because of their claim to realism, served only to fuel the increasing racial tensions in America. Furthermore, the claim to realism, as Mikhail Bakhtin conceived it, functions to reify man: “The ‘inductive’ approach, which is assumed to be inherent in realism, is in essence, a reifying causal explanation of man. The voices (in the sense of reified social styles) are thus simply transformed into

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the signs of things (or symptoms of processes).” Bakhtin asserts that as a result “[i]t is no longer possible to respond to them, one can no longer polemicize with them, and dialogic relations with such voices fades away.”19 Realism then performs a closing down of hermeneutics. For this reason, realism seemed the only appropriate form for an event that, in Baudrillard’s words, “defies not just morality, but any form of interpretation.”20 Lunar Park underwrites the fearful, “careful” representative discourse that surrounded the events of 9/11 by addressing the attacks within a figurative gothic discourse that enables an understanding of the debates the attacks precipitated, that many authors avoided. In many ways, Lunar Park is a resistance to the specifically moral imperative to write and to the imposition of artistic restraint that that moral imperative imposes. Ellis presents a narrative of hyperbole, and the shift into the past tense signifies and criticizes a denial of the contemporary and a fear of the present. It highlights both the inability to articulate oneself in language in present time and the destructive implications of this suppression. The novel periodizes the first decade of the twenty-first century in America as an era of fear in the wake of 9/11 and, through self-parody, works to refuse it. Ellis underwrites the cultural precipitation of anxiety by both the left-liberal and Republican sectors of society through creating his unreliable narrator from the damning media portrayals of his life as a celebrity author. Bret, in Lunar Park, is the replacement self of Ellis, a self that has been reified into its media construction. Throughout Lunar Park, Ellis is concerned with the ethics surrounding the becoming real of cultural and authorial fictions. Ellis enacts this becoming real through creating Bret. Most of the extreme criticism surrounding American Psycho came from the liberal press, from publications such as the New York Times. The first forty-five pages of Lunar Park bring into being the drug-fueled depraved celebrity author “Bret Easton Ellis” that the press created, the celebrity author as “raving, coked up, sucking back another Stoli” (LP, 26). Bret recalls memories of “lavish catered parties—sometimes complete with strippers” and “three fairly exclusive orgies,” as well as details perhaps not created by the liberal press, such as the dinner at the White House in the summer of 1986 as “the guest of Jeb and George W. Bush, both of whom were fans” (LP, 13). Ellis’s critics had sought repentance from Ellis for American Psycho, which he did not provide with his subsequent novel Glamorama. The new Victor specifically refuses repentance in Glamorama. Bill tells him “[p]eople are paying attention . . . People love repentance.” Victor responds, “Is that what I’m doing, Bill? . . . Repenting?” (G, 455). It is

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a question directed not just to Bill but beyond the narrative to Ellis’s reader. Victor’s subsequent statement, “[t]hat’s not me” is doublevoiced with the author’s own. In Lunar Park, Ellis parodies this demand for contrition by his own critics through providing a surface narrative that shows the author suffering retribution for his depraved ways and his violent creations, namely Patrick Bateman. In short, the book is a trap. Quite brilliantly the response of the press was perfectly pitched to Ellis’s instrumental trap. The following is from Christopher Cleave, writing for The Sunday Telegraph: Mr Ellis launches Lunar Park with a wry autobiography charting his mercurial rise and saturnine drug-fuelled annihilation . . . These thirty pages of autobiography somehow mutate into this year’s most interesting novel . . . it is triumphant piece of storytelling from a rebel whose work is controversial precisely because its sinister themes are so dexterously written.21

Placed at the outset of book in the extensive list of press cuts titled “Praise for Lunar Park,” Cleave, in viewing the book as autobiographical, appears not to be able to distinguish between “Bret,” the narrator, and Ellis, the author of Lunar Park. Perhaps more ironic is the juxtaposition of this celebration of the author as a bad boy by Cleave writing in a conservative publication, with the praise by Edward Wyatt writing for the New York Times. Wyatt, playing right into Ellis’s hands, defines the book as a sentimental “exorcism,” a “re-examination of Mr Ellis’s life and work.”22 Many critics then failed to realize that the narrator of Lunar Park is a creation of their own moralistic interpretations and misapprehensions of Ellis’s work. As it will become apparent in the third part of this chapter, “the writer” intervenes in the latter part of the novel in a doppelganger relation with Bret, testifying to the distance between the author and his narrator. Once again then, Ellis’s work creates dialogic relations between the contemporary critic and the author, who manipulates the media to his subversive means, imbuing his novel with an active sociopolitical function. Highlighting the cultural need for real representations that can be assimilated into the every day, few critics saw the complex and dissident discourse with post-9/11 American culture that takes place in Lunar Park. Through the figurative vehicle of a contemporary gothic narrative, Ellis effects a refusal of the contemporary social climate. Žižek’s notion that fear is “a basic constituent of today’s subjectivity”23 is both manifested in and underwritten in the narrative by Bret’s

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hauntings. Three modes of haunting take place in the novel, which have the structure of a topological knot in the narrator’s psyche. The first is the Oedipal haunting of Bret by his dead father. The trauma of 9/11 and the counterattack of the American invasion of Iraq inflicted by the Bush administration is the second, mediating haunting, implied in the imagery and the language of the Oedipal haunting. Thirdly, the narrator is haunted by the polyphonous apparitions of his past creations as well as by the other “true” self of “the writer,” who enters the narrative and terrorizes the reified self of Bret. The implied reciprocal haunting is Bret himself, a specter of Ellis who haunts Lunar Park. Bret is simultaneously haunter and haunted, terrorist and victim, narrator and impostor. It is this complex triumvirate web of haunting that provides the apparatus for Ellis’s critique of the responsibility of the writer. The framework of the novel is, then, a larger haunting of the self, of which these three individual modes of haunting are a part. The doppelganger split between Bret and “the writer” is the central gothic trope of the novel and reveals the haunting of the self to also be the haunting of the artist by the censored freedom of his expression. In parody, Bakhtin states, “[t]he specific actual parodied discourse is only implied . . . in these instances authorial discourse itself either poses as someone else’s, or claims someone else’s discourse as its own.”24 Ellis parodies himself as conceived by the media. This is seen in Bret’s use of the moralistic language of the liberal press, which chastised him for American Psycho: “I was moving with a higher purpose. I was involuntarily striving towards something” (LP, 43). Bret states in reference to his satirical transformation from bad boy celebrity to family man, “I found myself changing and had no choice but to feel that this conversion validated me.” For instance, there was no more flipping through what he calls the “devil’s dictionary,” Zagat’s, Patrick Bateman’s restaurant bible. That Bret had no choice but to feel validated through his conversion points both to the atonement demanded of him by the media and to his position within the narrative, that he is constructed and controlled by the author, Ellis. Recalling a moment that completes his sense of rehabilitation, while also providing the prerequisite romanticism for the gothic narrative, he states: “One day late in August I drove by a simple field dotted with poplars and I suddenly held my breath. I felt a tear on my face. I was happy, I realized with amazement” (LP, 43). The final lines of the first section preface the turn in the narrative and create uncertainty in the reader as to the veracity of the narrative to follow. Bret signals his unreliability when he asserts that the book

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is “ostensibly” a true story. He admits that in his own way he had committed the murders that occur during the period he is about to describe, yet reveals that his wife and his mother dispute the horror of the events that took place. The only evidence that Bret could defer to are the FBI files that were created during the controversy surrounding American Psycho, yet “[t]hey have not been released and I’m barred from quoting them” (LP, 44), he tells the reader. Here censorship and prohibition prevent access to truth. Witnesses have disappeared, he states, the paranormal detective has “simply vanished,” and he points to his psychiatrist’s assessment, that he was not himself during this period, suggesting he was perhaps in a “delusional state.” As if these remarks are not enough to destabilize the reader entirely, Bret adds: “Names have been changed, and I’m semivague about the setting itself because it doesn’t matter; it’s a place like any other” (LP, 45). Bret’s statement reads like a disclaimer at the beginning of a docudrama, a reenacting of a particular set of events. The ineludible nature of the events as Bret conceives them establishes his sense of fatalism. The structure of the narrative as recalling memories of a trauma and the temporal setting of the horror as beginning in late October, with the last memory of happiness located in late August, establishes the dialogue with 9/11. Having underscored the instability of his narrative, Bret then places a contradictory narrative injunction upon the reader: “[T]here’s one thing you must remember as you hold this book in your hands: all of it really happened, every word is true” (LP, 45). That this preemptive narrative claim to truth undermines the realism of the book to follow yet insists on its verisimilitude, initiates a discourse between writing, representation, truth, and trauma. The novel can be read in this way as parodying the claim to realism. Bret’s disavowal of reality is also an assertion of what he believes to be the characteristic trait of the author and his methodology. “As a writer you slant all evidence in favor of the conclusions you want to produce and you rarely tilt in favor of the truth” (LP, 218). In Bret’s opinion, the writer’s life is “a maelstrom of lying” (LP, 218). He comments on the writer’s central skill of “embellishment,” the act that, in Bret’s opinion, the writer carries out with words in order to “please others” and to “flee ourselves.” For Bret, who is writing his next novel, Teenage Pussy, it is an act in which “God became the devil” and “a daughter became a whore,” to name just two of the clichés he offers up. Bret comments: I had been inordinately rewarded for participating in this process, and lying often leaked from my writing life—an enclosed sphere of

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consciousness, a place suspended outside of time, where the untruths flowed onto the whiteness of a blank screen—into the part of me that was tactile and alive. But, admittedly, on that third day of November, I was at a point at which I believed the two had merged and I could not tell one from the other. (LP, 218)

This passage appears to reveal the mechanisms behind Bret’s thought, but he instantly refutes it by telling the reader that this is what he told himself, because he knew better, he knew that the previous night (the Terby incident after the dinner party) was, in fact, the reality (LP, 218). Bret adds a troubling layer of imposed restraint on his narrative: “[I]n order to move on I needed to rationalize the things I had seen to prove to myself that I wasn’t losing my mind” and then admits to the reader, “[i]t took an immense amount of concentration and balance to pivot back and forth between the illusory and what you knew without a doubt was true and real, and you had to hope that you wouldn’t unravel somewhere on the trail that connected the two” (LP, 218−219). In view of these comments, two spheres operate in the text to materialize the problematics of representation. The reified Bret struggles between the imposition on himself of the constraints of literary conventionality and the authorial creativity, which he is in the process of renouncing. The guiding structural principle of Lunar Park is the complex interplay of fiction and reality and the problematics engendered by the blurring of these two states. Bret’s narrative stands poised on the boundary between fiction and the claim to reality, shifting between the two states and erasing this boundary through the haunting of Bret by his fictional creations. Bret’s fictional constructs become real within the perimeters of his consciousness. The culture of fear that is the backdrop of Bret’s hallucinations points to what Baudrillard saw as America’s attempts at “deterrence against physical insecurity and terrorism.” Nothing, however, Baudrillard remarked in 2002, “will protect us from this mental insecurity.”25 It is the dangers and limitations of this mental insecurity that Ellis underwrites in Lunar Park.

Culture of Fear The world of Lunar Park is the fallout of the twentieth century in which graffiti reads “BELIEVE THE SKEPTICS” (LP, 408). Here man finds himself, in Baudrillard’s terms, “beyond the end, beyond a situation that could be grasped by our earlier categories of rational or dialectical thought.”26 The setting of the novel is “the anonymous

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suburbia of the Northeast” of America (LP, 40). Jayne, Bret’s celebrity wife, exemplifies the problematic relationship of the individual to the post-9/11 urban landscape. The suburbs afford Jayne the proximity to New York necessary for the meetings and business that her acting career demands, but situate her and her children “safely distant from what she saw as the increasing horror of urban life.” The decision by Jayne to move to the suburbs revolves primarily around the threat of violence: The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was the initial motivation, and Jayne briefly considered some exotically remote place deep in the Southwest or the vastness of the heartland, but her goal eventually simplified itself into moving at least two hours away from any large city, since that’s where suicide bombers were blowing themselves up in crowded Burger Kings and Starbuckses and Wal-Marts and in subways at rush hour. (LP, 40)

The initial psychological impact of the attacks on Jayne is manifested in a desire for extreme geographical remoteness. This desire is described in terms of a fantasy. Geographical isolation is perceived as exotic, and the vastness of the American heartland is considered a luxury. Proximity to the city is feared, but so also is proximity to others. In Jayne’s conception, it is multiple individuals in confined spaces that are the sites of danger, crowded fast food restaurants, and in particular, the subways at rush hour. Initially, this description seems a paranoid vision of the New York cityscape. As Bret’s description of the American urban landscape continues, it becomes apparent that the novel is set in fictionalized landscape that is hyperbole born out of the politics of fear: Miles of major cities had been cordoned off behind barbed wire, and morning newspapers ran aerial photographs of bombed-out buildings on the front page, showing piles of tangled bodies in the shadow of the crane lifting slabs of scorched concrete. More and more often there were “no survivors.” Bulletproof vests were on sale everywhere, because scores of snipers had suddenly appeared; the military police stationed on every corner offered no solace, and surveillance cameras proved useless. There were so many faceless enemies—from within the country and abroad—that no one was certain who we were fighting and why. Cities had become mournful places, where everyday life was suddenly interrupted by jagged mounds of steel and glass and stone, and grief on an unimaginable scale was rising up over them, reinforced by the stained, tattered photocopies of the missing posted everywhere,

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which were not only a constant reminder of what had been lost but also a warning of what was coming next, and in the endless CNN montages of people wandering around in a slow-motion daze, some wrapped in American flags, while the soundtrack was Bruce Springsteen softly singing “We Shall Overcome.” There were too many fearful moments when the living envied the dead, and people started moving away to the country, the suburbs, anywhere (LP, 41).

“Cities,” Bret states describing Jayne’s attitude, “were no place to raise a family, or, more pointedly according to Jayne, start one” (LP, 41). “So many people,” Bret comments, “had lost their capacity for love.” Bret’s words here resonate with Adorno’s, who stated after the holocaust, “[p]eople of course, are spellbound, and none of them are capable of love, which is why everyone feels loved too little.”27 Bret’s depiction of the American landscape is apocalyptic and chaotic. Beginning with the attacks on the World Trade Center, it increasingly reads like a description of the news footage of the Second Gulf War. The media montages suggest the possibility of confusion between representation of the 9/11 attacks and the Second Gulf War, that these two incidents now formed a continuous whole within the virtual simulacra of CNN footage. Throughout the narrative, Bret reiterates that boundaries were being erased. In this passage, it is the boundaries between two cultural traumas. Yet the description ends with the image of people wrapped in American flags, the patriotism of Springsteen singing “We Shall Overcome” (originally a protest song sang by activists of the civil rights movement), and the dispersion of American people from the cities to the suburbs. The violence and the images of the Second Gulf War are contained within the American identity here. The lines “[t]here were so many faceless enemies—from within the country and abroad—that no one was certain who we were fighting and why” are applicable both to the sentiments of America post-9/11 and the civilians in Iraq. Ending the passage with the American individual exhibits how the American media claimed the images of destruction as images of violence that afflicted America only. Ellis’s portrayal of America in Lunar Park echoes Alain Badiou’s notion of an “atonal” world. The anonymity sought by Jayne through her move to the suburbs inflects yet mirrors the anonymity of the enemies, those suspected of inflicting irrational subjective violence. Žižek remarks that Badiou’s “atonal” world “lacks “the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality.”28 For a definition of the Master-Signifier within the modern world, Žižek draws on the last pages of Winston

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Churchill’s The Second World War. Regarding the enigma of a political decision, Churchill asserted that once the cultural specialists in the fields of economic, military, psychology, and meteorology have provided their analyses of the situation, there must be someone to transpose in simplified terms the summary of these complex views. The onus on the communicator is to recontextualize these oftenconflicting analyses into “a simple, decisive Yes or No. We shall attack or we continue to wait.”29 For Žižek, John F Kennedy provides an apt account: “the essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer— often indeed, to the decider himself.” Such a decisive gesture, Žižek explains, “which can never be fully grounded in reasons is that of a Master.”30 The contemporary world tries to dispense of “this agency of the ordering Master-Signifier” in order for “the complexity of the world . . . to be asserted unconditionally.”31 For Badiou, this modern condition is in fact nothing but an overall desire for atony. According to Žižek, a result of this is that we inhabit a social space that is progressively experienced as that which Badiou called “worldless.”32 “Meaningless” violence is the only possible mode of violence within this space. Moreover, fear is generated in this space precisely from the unknown, from “the causal non-transparency of the threats involved: not so much the transcendence of the causes as their immanence (we don’t know to what extent we are ourselves bringing about the danger).”33 This causal nontransparency is manifested in the media articles that Bret says “kept stroking my fear” (LP, 81). The “missing” posters that simultaneously remind the individual of loss and warn of “what was coming next” impose a sense of fatalism exacerbated by the torrent of negative cultural reportage: New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. Evidence suggested that we were not doing well. Researchers gloomily agreed. Environmental psychologists were interviewed. Damage had “unwittingly” been done. There were “feared lapses.” There were “misconceptions” about potential. Situations had “deteriorated.” Cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. (LP, 82)

The reaction of the American populace, Bret reports, was to be “confounded.” But crucially, this confusion is not twinned with a reciprocal desire to know why and to take action. Instead, the populace “didn’t care.” Apathy in Lunar Park is the container of fear: “Unpublished studies hinted that we were all paying a price. Scientists peered into

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data and concluded that we should all be very worried. No one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. And no one argued back. No one challenged anything. Anxiety was soaking up most people’s days” (LP, 81). The individual, entirely submissive to events as a consequence of the fatalistic attitude, becomes a spectator of events as if they are watching a disaster movie: “Most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. You couldn’t help being both afraid and fascinated. Reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn’t seem very important in the long run. We were doomed. We deserved it” (LP, 82). Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s notion of a “risk society,” one in which the individual’s subjective stance of “I am hungry” has been replaced with “I am afraid,”34 Žižek comments that as risks continue to arise, we rely on scientists to provide the solutions. However, while scientists are indeed the subjects who are supposed to know, Žižek claims, they do not know. Thus Žižek locates the problematic component of the “becoming-scientific” of our societies: “[W]hile we increasingly rely on experts even in the most intimate domains of our experience (sexuality and religion), this universalization only transforms the field of scientific knowledge into an inconsistent and non-antagonistic non-All.”35 The scientific articles that Bret defers to for reassurance in fact perpetrate his sense of fatalism. Furthermore, in his capitulation to the doom they signify, Bret exhibits how the “antagonistic nonAll” afflicts the subject with a sense of the obsolescence of the human in the future course of events. This passive antagonism is underlined by the media’s responses to the missing boys who had vanished from the community “without a trace.” The news conferences organized by CNN with the aim of mobilizing volunteers for those who were giving up hope, Bret reports as accomplishing “nothing beyond serving as a reminder of “ ‘the incidental malice of the universe’ (courtesy of Time)” (LP, 82). Time magazine works in partnership with CNN. The statement here cited from Time collaborates with the imposition of fear from CNN that uses the language of panic and chaos reporting “frantic searches” for the missing boys. In the CNN and Time interventions in the characters’ lives, Lunar Park attests to the “collapse of critical distance between the government and the media”36 that critics such as Neil Smith view as characteristic of contemporary American society. As a result of the social climate, the adult characters in Lunar Park have immersed themselves and their children in a closed suburban community, a self-enclosed pocket of middle-class America

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that has internalized the external culture of fear. Homologous to their social isolation, their community is built upon the politics of fear: “Distrust everybody was the message.” The community is paradigmatic in minutiae of the contemporary condition that Žižek describes as a “post-political bio-politics.” The post-political refers to a nonideological politics that focuses instead on expert management and administration. The biopolitics takes as its primary goal the “regulation of the security and welfare of human lives”37 and prioritizes the defense of the individual from possible victimization or harassment. At such “a zero level of politics”, the only mobilizing principle left is fear: “fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state itself, with its burden of high taxation, fear of ecological catastrophe, fear of harassment.”38 Fundamental to this is that in contemporary society, “[p]olitical correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear” as “[s]uch a (post)-politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ochlos or multitude.” In short, “[i]t is the frightening rallying of frightened people.”39 The influence of this (post) political climate is shown in the community-imposed prohibitions in the suburban social group of Lunar Park. While Bret remains an outsider to this community throughout the novel, Jayne is its model citizen: “Jayne wanted to raise gifted, disciplined children, driven to succeed, but she was fearful of just about everything: the threat of pedophiles, bacteria, SUVs (we owned one), guns, pornography and rap music, refined sugar, ultraviolet rays, terrorists, ourselves” (LP, 41). The family’s life is governed by these principles. At one point, Bret mentions that nonfresh orange juice was in general prohibited in the household “because it causes cavities and obesity” (LP, 89). This statement echoes the national health warnings put on products, suggesting that in Lunar Park, it is no longer the labeling of objects, as in the case of Patrick Bateman, or the labeling of celebrities, as in the case of Victor, but now the labeling of fear that has become the fetishized component of contemporary culture. The school that the children attend enforce a nanny-state, politically correct attitude toward Halloween: The school originally had okayed “appropriate” costumes while actively discouraging anything inappropriate (nothing “violent” or “scary” or “with weapons”), but predictably, the children, even on all their meds, started to freak out en masse, so costumes were simply banned (exhausted parents pleaded for a compromise—“Nominally frightening?”—which was rejected). (LP, 97)

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The educational institution in banning Halloween costumes imposes authority over the parent, and thus intervenes as the parent-state. This disempowers the parent and the institution assumes the position of head of the family unit. There is a transparent social discourse here between individual and state apparatus: the school permits appropriate costumes in the guise of a liberal gesture. When this is tentatively challenged, the costumes are simply banned altogether in a sweeping totalitarian “protective” gesture. The architecture of the school parallels its approach to power. “Hidden in a forest” the school was “so minimalist that it possessed an unnerving glamour. And it was all based on control, yet it wasn’t claustrophobic, even with all the elms and the shrubs that enclosed the school’s grounds. It was comforting, even playful” (LP, 224). The school is representative of the social suburban space. It functions on control while it simultaneously resists being experienced as claustrophobic. Describing the neighborhood, Bret explains: “The only thing separating our property from the Allens’ was a low row of hedges, yet the houses were spaced so widely apart that any complaints about a lack of privacy were irrelevant” (LP, 204). The strictly regulated space, controlled but not oppressing, corresponds to the mechanisms of the politics of fear. The illusion of the low row of hedges implies a liberal tolerance and openness toward others, yet the distance between the houses manifests the counterpoint of such openness, a fear of harassment. Žižek summarizes this condition in which “tolerance coincides with its opposite”: “the Other is just fine, but only insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as this Other is not really other.”40 The imposition of this controlled tolerance as social conditioning is revealed in the school’s notion of what constitutes disobedience. At the parents and teachers’ evening, the teachers reprimand Sarah’s behavior at school and warn Jayne of what they consider to be a behavioral problem; they report that “she doesn’t know where her personal space ends and someone else’s begins and she can’t read facial expressions, and she’s nonresponsive when people are talking directly to her” (LP, 246). Sarah’s behavior disobeys the school’s rule of tolerance, which is that which Žižek conceives as the duty not to get too close to the Other, that the individual must respect the Other’s intolerance of over-proximity. This conception of what is socially unacceptable in Sarah’s behavior mirrors the idea that American society had post-9/11 of how a terrorist would act. Thus Sarah’s behavior is worrying to the school as it effectively characterizes her as the antagonistic Other. Simultaneously, Sarah is berated for over-proximity and condemned for not being able to read the Other and for not responding to the Other. The attitude

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of the school reveals a tight set of behavioral rules that the individual is expected to follow to maintain a nonthreatening, nonviolent state of being in the social milieu. A by-product of the social attitude exhibited by the community and the school’s interventionist approach to the parents is a project-type approach of the parents to raising their children. At the dinner party that Bret and Jayne attend at their neighbour’s house, Bret describes the guests displaying an “obsession with their children that bordered on the fanatical” (LP, 198). He observes: “These parents were scientists and were no longer raising their kids instinctually—everyone had read a book or skimmed the net to find out what to do.” He reports having heard the term “portal” used as a metaphor for nursery school, and that there were “five-year-olds with bodyguards” (LP, 198). The conversation at the dinner table centers on issues such as “cutting pasta from the school lunch program, and the nutritionist who catered for the bar mitzvah, and the Pilates class for two-year-olds” (LP, 198). Childhood is effectively annihilated by this approach. This unrecognized dehumanizing of the child by the parent is shown in the apparent inability of Jayne to see that Sarah resembles a child prostitute in her tight tops that read “BABE” and “LINGERIE” (LP, 191), inappropriate clothing for a six-year-old child and ironic when set against Jayne’s fear of pedophiles. The businesslike approach to nurturing that disregards juvenility results in a capitalist demand in terms of the child: “[T]hey wanted something back, they wanted a return on their investment—this need was almost religious” (LP, 198). The impact on the children is disturbing. All the children in the novel are on medication (LP, 190) and the school reveals to the parents that “[e]ight and a half percent of all children under the age of ten tried to kill themselves last year” (LP, 225). The insularity of the community results in the teenage boys going missing. Significantly, toward the end of the novel, it is clear they are leaving of their own accord. “These boys had vanished without a trace,” Bret reports, “and there were no hints that any of them was ever coming back” (LP, 82). Ambiguity surrounds the disappearances, and the inhabitants’ fear results in a heightening of their desire for anonymity. During the trick-or-treating in the neighborhood, the parents voices are described as a “collective murmuring” about why there were so many cars that year, and Bret describes a “quiet hesitancy” that hovered over everything. This is another reminder of the missing boys, who throughout the novel, echo the missing people in America post-9/11 and the fear of the Other precipitated by 9/11. “I noticed how quiet it was,” Bret recounts, “as if no one wanted to attract any unwanted attention from the stranger lurking in the shadows” (LP, 137– 8).

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The insularity of the community and the fear of intrusion of the Other upon one’s space parallels the shutting down of American borders post-9/11. 9/11 had a particularly negative impact on the U.S.-Mexico border relations. John Tirman observes this in his essay “Immigration and Insecurity: Post-9/11 Fear in the United States” (2006). “[T]he initial focus of attention, reflecting the ethnicity of the 9/11 attackers, actually affected a much broader swath of people in or hoping to enter the U.S.,”41 Tirman reports. The Terby doll, which in Bret’s hallucinations terrorizes the family, is smuggled in from Mexico. The doll functions in the novel as a trope of fear, and points to the swing in the public focus that apprehended the U.S.-Mexican border as a site for national insecurity post-9/11. Tirman acknowledges the exaggerated nature of the alarms raised regarding immigrants after September 2001. In light of the panic surrounding borders and immigration, the paranoia of the inhabitants of the suburban pocket in Lunar Park can be read as a social mise-en-abyme of the general social climate of America post-9/11. It is implicated that the boys are running away precisely because of the social control. This is an important detail in Ellis’s critique. In Lunar Park, there is no “stranger lurking in the shadows,” only the presupposition of one evoked by the terror felt by the community. In 2006, the 9/11 Commission Report showed that there were “no domestic conspiracies of any significance at the time of the attacks, and there have been none revealed since.”42 The novel, then, depicts a world in which the generational gap between the adults and their children has accelerated into a condition of total alienation. The missing boys are indicative of this. Robby and his friends are described by Bret as having formed a “disaffected clique” (LP, 168). The boys’ voices are toneless and Robby is repetitively described as “withdrawn” (LP, 160). When Robby runs into his friends in the mall, they are all exiting Mail Boxes Etc. Robby has something to post but when he answers Bret’s question of why he needs to go to Mail Boxes Etc., Bret doesn’t pay attention to his answer. The apathy of the parents toward their children, in this instance Bret not listening to his son, results in their ignorance regarding the disappearance of the boys. But there is also a cultural media aspect to the boys’ vanishings that is linked to their relationship to cyberculture. Bret details an advertisement clearly directed at male youths: A scruffy, gorgeous youth, hands on his skinny-boy hips, stared defiantly into the camera and made the following statements in a blank voice, subtitled beneath him in a blood red scroll: “Why haven’t you become a millionaire yet?” followed by “There is not more to life than

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money” followed by “You do need to own an island” followed by “You should never sleep because there are no second chances” followed by “It is important to be slick and evocative” followed by “come with us and make a bundle” followed by “If you aren’t rich you deserve to be humiliated.” And then the commercial ended. That was it. I’d seen this ad numerous times and had yet to figure out what it meant or even what product it was trying to sell. (LP, 132)

The advertisement clearly invests success with the notion of capitalist gain, yet this wealth is not linked to materialism as such. No product is mentioned and the only possession detailed is an island, signalling that money can bring isolation and remoteness from the rest of the world. What the advertisement appeals to is an identity, “slick and evocative,” and, crucially, free from humiliation. The pressure is an extreme cultural form of the expectations that the parents inflict on the children (at dinner, Bret describes the parents as just trying to ensure “their perfect children’s ascension in the world” [LP, 195]). Furthermore, the ambiguity of the advertisement signals the lack of a cultural ideology in the twenty-first century. At the same time, Bret’s inability to decipher the advertisement aimed at his son points to the generational gap perpetrated by technological advances. “It’s a whole different world,” Huntington, one of the fathers at the dinner party murmurs. “They’ve developed an entirely new set of skills that set us way apart” (LP, 203). Another father points out “[t]hey know how to handle visual information,” but disparagingly announces that this does not impress him. Huntington’s perception, in tune with the advertisement, is that the boys “have no idea how to put things into context,” that they are “fragment junkies.” Mitchell remarks that the boys are “more technologically advanced” than their fathers, hinting that it is perhaps the parents that lack the knowledge to understand their children’s culture. Yet another father simply calls it “disruptive technology.” This stance is signaled by Mimi’s dislike of the game Doom, a game, according to Mimi, that the U.S. military uses to train soldiers (LP, 203). Indeed, the advertisement’s slogan, “[c]ome with us and make a bundle” and its pressure on the boys to be the best imposes the kind of language of recruitment into an organized regime that the American military uses to encourage young men to enlist. Thus the missing boys appear to be escaping the enclosed collective of their fearful parents not for the promise of individuality but for the formation of another collective, which ironically mirrors their parents’ desires in its pledge of membership to a wealthy, isolated collective.

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Geist: 9/11 and the Father Set in this culture of fear, the trauma of 9/11 and the subsequent invasion of Iraq haunt the narrative of Lunar Park. The two security guards at Bret’s Halloween party—Mary Shelly’s scientist protagonist, Victor Frankenstein (an ironic warning against fictional creations), and Dick Cheney, vice president of the United States from 2001 from 2009 and an instrumental figure in the invasion of Iraq—are also the figurative gatekeepers of Bret’s delusional hell. The bodyguards at the Halloween party are there to keep the horror within the parameters of the house, a guarded gesture that ironically reflects the gated insularity of America. While America was concerned with threats from the outside, Ellis suggests here that it is America’s Republican figures and America’s (and Bret’s) own creations that are the emblems of horror. Bret’s narrative in this sense can be read as Ellis’s engagement with the ethics of living in America in the twenty-first century. The presence of Cheney is important, as the affliction of 9/11 in Lunar Park is as much concerned with the crisis of ethics surrounding America’s decision to invade Iraq as it is with the traumatic events of September 2001. This dualism is reflected in Bret’s conception of himself as both the perpetrator of the murders that occur in the book (LP, 46) and Ellis’s portrayal of him as the victim of an inexpressible trauma throughout the narrative. Iraq is also implicated as a point of enmity between the children and their parents. Robby asks Bret if he’ll be drafted in the Second Gulf War. Bret reports: “I looked back at Robby and couldn’t help feeling that behind the indifference was disgust, and beyond the disgust, rage” (LP, 239). The antagonism of the younger generation toward their parents for seemingly generating war and the guilt manifested in Bret’s response reveals one of the central dualisms that underlies the novel. Bret’s anxiety over his creations can thus be read as double-voiced with the cultural anxiety of America’s foreign policy and the damaging cultural fictions of the threat of terrorism constructed by the media and the government post-9/11. Bret’s narrative moves from a portrayal of the author as selfdestructive to momentary restoration (in the section titled “Interlude”), to further self-destruction and collapse. Bret appears to be experiencing a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Roger Luckhurst details this as a condition through which the subject is liable to “ ‘persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event’ in the form of ‘recurrent and intrusive recollections,’ flashbacks, nightmares.” More rarely, Luckhurst observes, the posttraumatic subject

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undergoes a “reliving of the event in a dissociated and hyperaroused state.”43 Bret’s psychotic episodes bear the markers of this traumatic reenactment. He signals his disengagement from socio-geographical space by his statement at the outset that: “Lunar Park could have happened anywhere. These events were inevitable, and would have occurred no matter where I was at that particular moment in my life” (LP, 46). This places the events in the dissociated space of Bret’s psyche. Ellis utilizes the gothic convention of the double. Bret’s is a doppelganger narrative (a point I will return to), and as such, as Bakhtin states of Dostoevsky’s The Double: “The action cannot go beyond the bounds of self-consciousness, since the dramatis personae are no more than isolated elements of that self-consciousness.”44 Where some critics have seen Ellis’s use of the conventional Hollywood horror genre as an authorial solecism, the passages that resemble a Stephen King horror novel can be read as the virtual space of representation in which the representation of the void in the present can take place. Roger Luckhurst in fact recasts Stephen King from his usual relegation by critics to the best-seller lists, claiming that King’s tales are “unusually sensitive to the depredations to contemporary subjectivity” and that they are so compulsive because “[t]hey explore this discordance within narrative structures that work (for most of the time) towards fragile kinds of concord.”45 Rather than examples of trauma subjectivity, Luckhurst argues that King’s books are “narrative vectors for its consolidation.”46 The Gothic then is an evident device for representing the post-9/11 psychology. As Luckhurst remarks, “[t]rauma psychology frequently resorts to the Gothic or supernatural to articulate post-traumatic effects.”47 The two sites of trauma in Lunar Park, 9/11 and the loss of the (already) absent father, manifest in the horror scenes that signal the elliptical nature of the literary space marked by, in Hartman’s terms, “conscious or unconscious ‘avoidance,’ even by lightness, and the ‘nothing’ of this ellipsis makes the discourse, despite its referential or memorial function,” spectral.48 The garish and incredulous nature of the evil Terby doll, the skeletal apparition of Bret’s father, and perhaps most conspicuously, “The Thing in the Hall” (LP, 351−52), are important in their low-culture characteristics. They communicate that which Kelly Hurley terms “Thing-ness,” which in gothic literature “is the only way characters can describe that which is not human, indescribable.”49 The Terby leaves a trail of slime in its path of destruction. In gothic fiction, Hurley asserts that slime is the epitome of “the Thing-ness of matter.”50 Ellis is concerned in these representations to underscore the fictionality of Bret’s

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manifestations. In this way, Ellis performs an act of underwriting in the rare archaic reflexive sense of the term: “to fall below (oneself) in writing,” to write “with less acceptable power or fervour.”51 He uses “low-key writing” in Lunar Park intentionally, as a tool to represent the unrepresentable. The twelve days in which Bret experiences the horrific events point to that which Adorno described as the trouble with self-preservation after cultural trauma. Bret’s move to the suburbs and the attempt to integrate into a safe family unit can be seen as an attempt at self-preservation. Yet according to Adorno, the trouble with selfpreservation after the traumatic event is that “[w]e can’t help suspecting the life to which it attaches us of turning us into something that makes us shudder: into a spectre, a piece of the world of ghosts, which our waking consciousness perceives to be nonexistent.”52 Adorno’s anxiety regarding self-preservation is manifested in Bret’s world, in which he both encounters apparitions and is himself an apparition. At the Halloween party, Bret has a relapse with cocaine and alcohol. He describes a turning point in events that occurs when he sees the figure of Patrick Bateman: “[T]here was suddenly a sense that the party was getting out of control.” He articulates his reaction to this: “[S]omething inside me dropped and exploded—a moment of pure almost visceral despair” (LP, 72). The language Bret uses to express the catalyst reads like the description of a bombing. In Bret’s use of the language associated with terrorism, Ellis comments on the extent to which American culture was affected by the trauma of 9/11. This is not the first time he uses language associated with terrorism to express himself. In his autobiographical preface, he describes feeling as if he’d “been hijacked” by demands made on him on the Glamorama tour. His handler, he says, was calling the tour “a legitimately traumatic experience” (LP, 33). Bret’s description of his moment of despair has no object; “something” inside him dropped. This anonymous catalyst sets off a reaction of deep inner distress, which causes a shift in his perception. After this moment, Bret looks out of the window at the fake graveyard erected for Halloween and describes a group of students “crawling around each other through the headstones,” a scene that echoes the aftermath of the attacks and the rubble of ground zero. This is accompanied by “a mist rolling in and drifting towards the house” (LP, 73), a figurative trope for the rolling waves of the 9/11 ash. When he goes upstairs to investigate the disturbing reports Sarah has made to him regarding her Terby doll, he experiences the sconces flickering on and off in the hallway. In Sarah’s room, he describes the pillow looking “as if it had been, well,

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attacked . . . as if something had lunged at it continually” (LP, 75). He encounters the Terby doll that caused the damage with its beak, and when he flees, he has a similar corridor experience to the first one: “I didn’t look back as I raced down the hallway, the sconces flickering on and off as I rushed past them . . . as I tumbled down the curving staircase heading towards the sanctity of my office” (LP, 78). The image of the corridor, like the ash and the flickering lights, recur throughout the narrative. The corridor is clearly a point of trauma. Bret signals this when he remarks while traveling in a car, “I was ignoring the unswaying palm trees that turned the interstate into a corridor” (LP, 317). Similar moments take place that turn natural objects into other 9/11 tropes. For instance, encountering wind-bent palm trees, Bret imagines “their trunks pushing out of the dark, hard ground for my benefit only” (LP, 287) and, later in the novel, “[t]rees kept bursting up through the ground” (LP, 369). The most prominent example of this is “The Wind” incident, in which a gale experienced at the college campus prevents Bret from looking for the car he had as a teenager (that Bret’s young double Clayton now drives). Through Bret’s narration of it, the scene reenacts an explosion: The wind subsided briefly but then another huge sheet was literally pushing me out of the parking lot, and when I saw students, startled and grimacing, running for cover into the buildings, I lowered my head and staggered against the wind, heading for shelter in the campus pub, The Café, and stood beneath the awning, where I grabbed a wooden column to support myself, but then gave up, letting the force of the wind slam me against a wall. The wind lashed out with such an explosion that a vending machine I was standing beside toppled over. When I looked up squinting, I could see the hands on the clock tower swinging like pendulums. You could actually hear the wind snarling. (LP, 274-5)

Bret imbues the wind with an antagonistic objective, a clear reference to the north wind that brings with it Hamlet’s madness. It also calls to mind the implicit enmity of the favorable wind conditions that aided the 9/11 attacks. In the trees, the wind, and the Terby doll, there is a recollection of the animation of the object on September 11. The wind here is violent, slamming Bret against the wall, lashing out and “snarling.” Amis recalled that the second plane “looked eagerly alive, galvanised with malice, and wholly alien.”53 Bret’s hallucinations, in which natural objects metamorphose into 9/11 tropes, cast that which Bakhtin called “the sheen of subjectification”54 on

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inanimate things. For Bakhtin, this ability is a feature of art and artistic literature. These eidetic moments in the novel are horrific yet transformative and they open up a hermeneutic space. The morning of the dinner party, Bret explains that the living room, which had metamorphosed after the Halloween party, was now returning to its normal state. “[E]ven though the wide expanse of beige Berber bordering on green shag was bothersome,” Bret remarks, “the room was no longer open to interpretation” (LP, 190). Bret’s hallucinations then open up Blanchot’s virtual space of representation, which is sealed off to the enclosed space of the suburban community and by extension, American culture post-9/11. After the first 9/11 haunting, and indeed after subsequent hauntings, Bret takes on the characteristics of both a trauma victim and a specter. He wakes up to a damp pillow due to crying in his sleep, a regular occurrence in Bret’s new life and one of the posttraumatic stress symptoms New Yorkers reported after the attacks. He tears the top sheet off his bed and drapes himself in it. “I walked out of the room a ghost” (LP, 78), he states. From this moment, Bret’s narrative shifts into the third person, as he refers to himself as “the ghost” and “the sniffling blob wrapped in the sheet hunched over the table” (LP, 85). Here the “I” of the narrator splits. Bret is decentered by his experience, which turns him into a spectator of himself. Adorno stated that after Auschwitz, “[t]hinking men and artists have not infrequently described a sense of being not quite there, of not playing along, a feeling as if they were not themselves at all, but a kind of spectator.”55 Jayne describes Bret as an object. In the language of catastrophe, she describes him as “a wreck” (LP, 87) and alludes to nuclear fallout when she tells Sarah, “Daddy’s contaminated right now” (LP, 96). Bret’s contamination is not with drugs and alcohol, however, but a contaminating rhetoric of fear that manifests in his language of self-expression and the imagery that his mind constructs. As he walks downstairs, he follows “large footprints that seemed to have been stamped in ash onto beige carpeting” (LP, 78). The footprints are a regular feature of Bret’s hallucinations and accompany the gradual metamorphoses of the house into his former childhood home. When he returns to the house later that day, the morning’s vacuuming “still hadn’t cleaned up the footprints,” (LP, 130) which are “large and ash-colored.” Later in the narrative, they appear in his office on the university campus (LP, 277), signaling that it is not the house that they are haunting. Later, Robert Miller, the demonologist whom Ellis consults, says, “I have seen a person turn to ash because of their

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antagonism” (LP, 381). The ash is both the ash of Bret’s father’s body and an echo of 9/11. The father and 9/11 are in this way linked through a shared antagonism. The events of 9/11 are given a historical double in the text through the repeated intertextual reference to Pearl Harbor in the ghostly occurrence of Stephen Spielberg’s film 1941 (LP, 72). Set in 1941, Spielberg’s film is a comedy about the panic that beset Los Angeles after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Bret states that it had been on a lot lately. Through the appearance of the film, Ellis is drawing a clear historical parallel between the two attacks on America, using Spielberg’s representation of the panic that followed the attacks on Pearl Harbor six decades earlier to underwrite and critique the fear and paranoia that swept America post-9/11. He recalls “John Belushi flying a plane high over Hollywood Boulevard, a cigar clenched between his teeth, a mad gleam in his eye” (LP, 249). The reference to Pearl Harbor also underlines 9/11 as an event used to mobilize support for an invasion of Iraq. David Harvey articulates this: Iraq had long been a central concern for neo-conservatives, but the difficulty was that public support for military intervention was unlikely to materialize without some catastrophic event ‘on the scale of Pearl Harbor’, as they put it. 9/11 provided the golden opportunity, and a moment of social solidarity and patriotism that was seized upon to construct an American nationalism that could provide the basis for a different form of imperialist endeavour and internal control.56

The haunting of 1941 both denotes the precipitation of national fear and critiques the military intervention in Iraq subsequent to 9/11. For Bret, the film’s title also has a personal historical context, as Robert Ellis was born in 1941. The Oedipal haunting acquires a political context through the dates of Bret’s father’s birth and death. His father died in 1992, the year George Bush lost the presidential election. Dates in the novel hold an unnerving specificity in the sequence of events, as a date, Hartman observes, “potentially places us beyond ambivalence, embarrassment, perplexity, and verbal equivocation.”57 Furthermore, they are triggers. When Bret makes the connection between 1941 playing and the birth date of his father, he enters his office and notices that he is receiving an endless scroll of e-mails from the Bank of America in Sherman Oaks. The relation between the Oedipal debt that his father leaves is, as Catherine Morley has rightly observed, a marker of the economic expansion during Clinton’s presidency in America and also a source of individual anxiety.58 The Bank

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of America was also the financial institution that was, at 132,586 square foot, the largest rented premise in Building One of the World Trade Center, the same building that Bret’s lawyers office is in before September 2001 (LP, 23). Indeed, at the end of the novel, Ellis returns to his lawyers to finalize his and Jayne’s divorce, but now the office is in the Empire State Building (LP, 443). When Bret explains that he’s late for the meeting because he’s never been to the Empire State Building, he remarks that “[a]n important pause seemed to fill the room after I admitted this” (LP, 443). “Dates mark the intersection of being and time,” Hartman asserts, while words, “shadowed by dates, create a counterecstatic, temporizing temporality.”59 When Bret steps in front of the computer into which the e-mails are flowing, the e-mails abruptly stop. The incident has the following effect on him: Through that long night I just sat in my office, numb, waiting for something, while my family slept upstairs. Everything around me was faintly vibrating, and I kept picturing a gray river of ash flowing backwards. At first I was filled with a sort of wonderment, but when I realized that it wasn’t tied to anything in particular, the wonderment crumbled into fear. And this was followed by grief and the piercing echoes from a past I didn’t want to remember, so I concentrated instead on the predictions rippling through me that, because of their dark nature, I then had to ignore. The denial of everything would pull me gently away from reality, but only for a moment, because lines started connecting with other lines, and gradually an entire grid was forming and it became coherent with a specific meaning and gradually emerging from the void was an image of my father: his face was white, and his eyes were closed in repose, and his mouth was just a line that soon opened up screaming. (LP, 253)

The vision Bret encounters here of receding ash offers a moment of imaginative beauty. Yet the absence of a signifying referent for the ash causes horror. The lack of specificity of this passage contrasts with the date that has the capacity to brand the spirit. Bret’s narrative can be seen as shadowed by the date “9/11,” a term for the attacks that was seized upon immediately by the American media and public, as “7/7” was for the bombings that took place in London on July 7, 2005. His narrative in his avoidance and denial temporalizes the short narrative time frame of twelve days. This temporalizing factor disappears when Bret experiences the skewed reenactments. The facts of his hallucinations are recounted in the form of fast, punchy, short sentences in which he has little conscious agency,

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textually reenacting the sentences that Victor uses in Glamorama to narrate his realizations and the terrorists’ actions. This parallels the minimalism Bret sees as the only way to relate the trauma of a later haunting, which clearly alludes also to the problematics of representing 9/11: “There really is no other way of describing the events that took place in 307 Elsinore Lane during the early morning of November 6 other than simply relating the facts” (LP, 342). The crumbling of wonderment into fear in Bret’s psyche happens precisely because of the lack of specificity, which is related to the lack of a Master-Signifier relation in the “atonal” world. What takes place in the narrative is the acting out of the impossibility to move beyond the stasis caused by trauma and fear that locks the narrative in figurative periphrasis that can only circulate the anonymous literal memory. Sitting on the porch wrapped in a blanket resembling the trauma victim and the ghost again after his father’s materialisation in the grid, Bret claims, “I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information—these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning—to restructure the evidence so it made sense—and that is what I failed at” (LP, 256). Yet Bret shows that paradox of terror and excitement that Mick Taussig voiced in 1988: “We felt strangely privileged, in so far as we could equate our epoch with ourselves, which is, I suppose, what historical judgement turns upon. And in drawing our grim conclusion, were we not deliberately making ourselves afraid, in ever so sly a way enjoying our fear?”60 Bret expresses his reification into the events after the murder of Aimee Light, explaining: I was gradually being comforted by the unreality of the situation. It made me tense, but it also disembodied me. The last day and night were so far out of the realm of anything I had experienced before that the fear was now laced with a low and tangible excitement. I could no longer deny becoming addicted to the adrenaline. The sweeps of nausea were subsiding and a terrible giddiness was taking their place. When I thought of “order” and “facts” I simply began laughing. (LP, 281)

However, during the previous haunting, when Bret’s mind makes connections through a geometrical construction, arguably because geometrics provides the abstract representation that his trauma necessitates, the image of his father appears in the grid, screaming, as a warning to Bret.

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The topology of relations between the hauntings of 9/11 and the father points to the temporal political structure of the previous decade, the first Gulf War, in August 1990, initiated by George Bush Sr., and the Second Gulf War, started in 2003, initiated by George Bush Jr. The father-son relationship between Robert Ellis and Bret functions sociopolitically to call into question the politics of the period. When the ghost of his father finally metamorphoses into an absurd horror construction of a “vaguely human” skeletal form, at first it is his father’s face illuminated in the skull. However, this face is rapidly replaced with Clayton’s, Bret’s ghostly doppelganger (LP, 401). The two figures share the skull: “[T]he resemblance between the two men could not be questioned,” Bret states. “[I]t was the face of the father being replaced by the face of the son” (LP, 402). It is the similarity of the father and the son and their morphing that is the site of his horror. Thus what might appear at first in the 9/11 tropes to be a comment on those responsible for the 9/11 attacks becomes a political discourse in which George Bush Sr. and Jr. are implicated as mutually responsible for the individual’s anxiety. Directly after the appearance of this demon, which disappears by “swirling into a cyclone of ash” (LP, 402), Miller comments that there are two opposing spirits at work in the haunting. This observation causes the door to Bret’s office to fly off its hinges “with such force that it sailed across the room and dented a wall,” and he reports, “[t]he ceiling above us suddenly cracked open in a long jagged strip, dusting our hair with plaster” (LP, 403). This 9/11 imagery is accompanied by the family house peeling away to reveal Bret’s former home in Sherman Oaks, the site of patriarchal trauma. Miller explains to Bret that the haunting involves a ghost who wants to tell him something and a demon who does not want this information imparted to him, and thus “[t]here were actually two forces opposing each other within the house” (LP, 403).

Becoming Real As I stated at the outset of this chapter, the moment that the Twin Towers were hit seemed to many cultural observers, including McEwan and Amis, to be a moment in which fiction became reality. Michael Bay’s pre-9/11 blockbuster movie Armageddon (1998) features images of a damaged World Trade Center. Post-9/11, Phil Alden Robinson’s disaster film The Sum of All Fears (2002) was both heavily edited and delayed in cinemas because its content was so close

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to the events of September 11, 2001. “Somewhere,” Baudrillard remarks with regard to these cultural fictions, America “was party to its own destruction.”61 For Baudrillard, the abundance of disaster movies “bear witness to this fantasy, which they attempt to exorcize with images and special effects.” Yet, he remarks, the effects of these films in reality is to exert a fascination, which “is a sign that acting-out is never far away.”62 On September 11, the fantasy of destruction, in becoming real, became the destruction of the fantasy. Perhaps more unnerving was the reversal of the notion of fiction’s transformation into reality, that reality had in fact become fiction. “The terrorists of September 11 want to bring back the past,”63 DeLillo wrote on December 22, 2001. Bret’s haunting by his past creations reveals the horror of reification into one’s own past fictions. Bret himself is a media construct, and as such, the vehicle through which Ellis critiques the state of reification. Timothy Bewes considers the implications of the term “reification” and asserts, “[w]e are becoming ever more deeply inserted into epistemological categories which falsify our relation to the world . . . ” that “[p]resent-day society is in a state of spiritual impoverishment which must somehow be reversed if calamity is to be avoided.”64 He states, “[r]eification is a process that, to an extent, we are all determined by and yet one which, through phenomenological reflection, we may come to recognise and resist.”65 Lunar Park depicts a world in which phenomenological reflection has not taken place and the forces of reification have gone beyond Marxist reification itself. Thus, while it is possible to read Lunar Park as being enclosed within a specific epoch, that of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is also possible to read the novel on a wider level, as disclosing the problem of the reification of semantic phenomena, in the form of cultural fictions, into a world that is itself devoid of historical fictions. In a culture of desublimation, the cultural models offer no space for phenomenological reflection and hermeneutic recuperation. Indeed, in the case of the events of September 11, Hollywood provided only a disconcerting mirror that seemed to suggest in Baudrillardian terms that what had happened was in fact the realization of America’s fantasy of self-destruction. Bret enters into dialogic relations with his polyphonous fictional creations. In doing so, he enacts a skewed version of the practice that Baudrillard perceives the terrorists to be conducting. “The terrorists,” Baudrillard asserts, “are taking ‘simulation’ referents (the towers, the market, the Western mega-culture) for real ones.”66 In his

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hauntings, Bret is simultaneously the terrorist and the terrorized. From Baudrillard’s perspective, he enacts terror on three counts. Firstly, as stated above, he takes his fictional creations to be real. In addition, this is accompanied by a denial of reality, which “is terroristic in itself.”67 Thirdly, his internalization of fear and the embodiment of this fear into the gothic tropes of “the thing in the hall” and the Terby doll manifests the notion that “[t]he spectre of terrorism is forcing the West to terrorize itself.”68 Patrick Bateman is the mediating figure in both the hauntings and the murders. Clayton, the mysterious boy who claims to be a student at the college, resembles both Clay and a younger Bret. He initially disguises himself as Bateman at Bret’s Halloween party. The copycat murderer who reenacts Bateman’s crimes disguises himself as Donald Kimball, the detective from American Psycho. The becoming real of the copycat murders act out the scenarios imagined by critics such as Roger Rosenblatt, who conceived the book as a piece of snuff literature.69 In view of Rosenblatt’s criticism, the reenactment of the murders plays into the parody of Bret’s repentance. Kimball tells Bret that at the scene of Aimee Light’s murder, “[t]here were only body parts,” and forensics is baffled because there are no fingerprints, “[t]he print man could not even come up with smudges or smears, and technicians found no signs of footprints or fibers, and serologists inspecting the spatter trajectories and the defensive wounds had found no blood samples other than the victim’s, which was exceedingly rare considering the brutality of the murder” (LP, 280). The lack of forensic evidence at the murder scenes colors the crimes with a spectral aspect that implies an act of terrorism. The becoming real of Bateman’s murders in this way parallels the becoming real of American cultural fictions in the 9/11 attack. In both the fiction of Bateman’s murders and the reality of the terrorist attacks, there were no fingerprints. In gothic fiction, “[d]oubling,” Julian Wolfreys proclaims, “is not simply a rhetorical device but is the figure of haunting par excellence.”70 The narrator as the “parody of the original,” the “ironic and grotesque version”71 of the author himself, parallels the nature of the virtual world in which the narrative is now enmeshed. The horrors of Bret’s hallucinations are manifestations that mirror on an internal level the self-referentiality and the state of cultural panic in the outside world, the terrorizing of itself of the West. In Lunar Park, in contrast to the preceding novels, Ellis’s subject is in a condition

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of Baudrillard’s rather than Marcuse’s earlier notion of “voluntary servitude”: What becomes of a master without a slave? He ends up terrorizing himself. And of a slave without a master? He ends up exploiting himself. The two are conjoined today in the modern form of voluntary servitude . . . We have become masters—at least virtual masters of this world, but the object of that mastery, the finality of that mastery, have disappeared.72

Lunar Park then is a post-ideological indictment of the dialectic of alienation in which the subject finds himself caught in contemporary culture. The Marxist fetishized object, so prominent in American Psycho and Glamorama, “a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort,”73 has disappeared entirely and only the psychoanalytic phobic object remains, which appears in an extreme and mutilated form in the narrator’s hallucinations in the Terby doll and “the thing in the hall.” Thus Lunar Park imagines a world in which the status of the psychoanalytic phobic object has been elevated to a status wholly above that of the Marxist fetishized object, because the vestiges of desire that made fetishism possible have disappeared. Lunar Park represents an inversion of the triangulated structure of desire by which the gap between subject and object has closed, yet a further aberration has occurred in which the fetish object has become the phobic object and that phobic object has been amalgamated with the consciousness of the subject. The narrative of Lunar Park exhibits a complete “reflection-into-self of the fetish.”74 Miller, the demonologist who Bret hires to exorcise the source of his hauntings tells Bret, “[t]hese tortured entities—have somehow manifested themselves into your reality” (LP, 386). The Terby, Bret reveals, is from a somewhat disturbing childhood story called “The Toy Bret,” a tale that Bret wrote when he was seven years old (LP, 416). Yet it is also a marker of Bret’s contrition, as reversed, as Bret point out, it spells “y bret.” Upon understanding that his fictions are becoming real, Bret elects to write a story in order to erase Patrick Bateman. Bret reports: “The story was static and artificial and precise. It wasn’t a dream—which is what a novel should be. But that was not the purpose of this story.” The purpose was, Bret claims, to let himself “be carried into the past, advancing backwards and rearranging something. The story was a denial” (LP, 418). The story that functions as a denial in its form of a static, artificial, and precise piece of writing, is the opposite of Ellis’s Lunar Park, which is oneiric

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and thus is what Bret claims a novel should be. Ellis’s Lunar Park, as the overarching narrative, functions to negate Bret’s act of writing against his own fictions in order to erase them. The voice of “the writer” that enters the narrative manifests this negation, “a semantic dimension that is directly opposed to the original one”75 that Bakhtin regards as a feature of parody. “The second voice, once having made its home in the other’s discourse,” Bakhtin writes, “clashes hostilely with its primordial host and forces him to serve directly opposing aims.” In this way, “[d]iscourse becomes an arena of battle between two voices.”76 This conflict mirrors the double haunting of two opposing forces that takes place within Bret’s house. “The writer,” who tells Bret what to do through syntactic interventions signaled by the use of italics, appears first as a dark voice inside Bret’s psyche after the initial appearance of Bret’s double, Clayton. Reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s split hero Golyadkin in The Double (1846), the writer grows in stature and testifies to the widening split in Bret’s consciousness. Yet whereas Golyadkin at first praises his double, addressing it as an independent entity, Bret fears “the writer.” “The writer’s “unbidden” (LP, 167) interventions are pseudo-objective statements uttered within the state of reification. For instance, in a moment of somewhat clichéd mental self-questioning, Bret contemplates why he has lost his sexual desire for Jayne: “[S]he was the wife, the mother, my savior. But how did that begin to constitute a celibate relationship?” The voice intervenes, “(“Ah yes, how indeed?” the dark voice in the back of my mind whispered frequently)” (LP, 124). In the scene in which Bret finds a dead cat near the house, it becomes apparent that “the writer” represents Bret’s faculty of imagination. He says, “I could not imagine the doll doing this. The Terby was simply a prop from a horror movie . . . But there was part of the writer who wanted the Terby to have killed the cat.” The writer, he says, “could imagine the scene.” At this point, the writer intervenes into Bret’s narrative, describing possible scenarios in which the Terby doll had killed the cat. Yet Bret reports, “I stepped in and forced the writer to hope this was not true. Because if I believed that the doll was responsible the ground I stood on would shift into quicksand” (LP, 305). Here Bret enters into a struggle with “the writer.” “The writer” knows more about the narrative than Bret, as he possesses the insight of the unrestrained writer and functions as the repressed voice of the imagination breaking through into Bret’s consciousness. As the dialogic relation between them intensifies, the voice of the writer becomes dominant, functioning as the nodal point of Bret’s realizations.

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“The writer” is the voice of resistance to aesthetic restraint, censorship, and fear. Toward the end of the novel, Bret throws the Terby doll into the field. Kill it, the writer whispered. Kill the thing now. You no longer need to convince me, I told the writer. The writer disliked me because I was trying to follow the chart. I was following an outline. I was calculating the weather. I was predicting events. I wanted answers. I needed clarity. I had to control the world. The writer yearned for chaos, mystery, death. These were his inspirations. This was the impulse he leaned toward. The writer wants bombs exploding. The writer wanted Olympian defeat. The writer craved myth and legend and coincidence and flames. The writer wanted Patrick Bateman back in our lives. The writer was hoping the horror of it all would galvanize me. I was at the point where all of what the writer wanted filled me with simple remorse. (I innocently believed in metaphor, which at this point the writer actively discouraged.) There were now two opposing strategies for dealing with the current situation. But the writer was winning, because as I ducked back into the Porsche I could smell a sea wind drifting towards me. (LP, 313)

The passage serves to write against the tendency to polemicize post9/11. Bret’s need for answers, clarity, and control implies identification with the American political discourse post-9/11. Yet the notion of following a chart and calculating the weather also aligns Bret with those responsible for the attacks. “The writer,” on the other hand, feels the need to galvanize Bret, to breathe life into the narrator through the elicitation of impulse over control, to break through Bret’s denial and reinstate the power of horror as aesthetic liberation. The figure of “the writer” is also slippery here. The writer’s desire for a kind of Nietzschean ecstasy expressed here through the imagery of bombs exploding, coincidence, flames, and the figure of Patrick Bateman appears to be a formulation comparable to the forms of violence associated with terrorism. Yet this yearning for chaos, mystery, and death has been the galvanizing principle of radical writers throughout history. Blanchot in The Book to Come (1959) comments on “the expression of this need we have to protect ourselves against what makes literature dangerous, as if, along with the poison, literature was quick to secrete for our use the antidote that allows for its

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calm, lasting consumption.” But, Blanchot warns, “[p]erhaps it dies from what makes it inoffensive.”77 Lunar Park embodies the struggle between the dangerous writer and the writer of censored literature. It is perhaps Bret, stifled by a culture of fear, who is responsible for expressing the galvanizing desires of “the writer” through the language of terrorism. As Baudrillard points out, the defensive reaction to the impact of terrorism, the imposition of regulation, including censorship, is the global system “internalizing, as it were, its own defeat.”78 A strangely paradoxical formulation results from this, according to Baudrillard: “an ‘automatic writing’ of terrorism, constantly refuelled by the involuntary terrorism of news and information.”79 Baudrillard’s formulation is rich in the context of Lunar Park. While unconsciously the hand of fear writes censored, cautious prose, the true hand of creativity and voice of artistic expression are incarcerated and silenced along with metaphysics and truth. In the final pages of the novel, having exorcised the ghost of his father and his past creations, Bret as a failed writer and a purely fictional construct collapses back into Ellis’s fiction, to be found only “in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park” (LP, 453).

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C ODA

The Politics of Exposure: Unsafe Lines and Narratives of Conf lict in Imperial Bedrooms

Imperial Bedrooms, published in 2010 on the cusp of a new decade, ushers the reader into an uneasy narrative and cultural space. Ellis’s second novel of the twenty-first century was written and marketed as a sequel to his first novel, Less Than Zero. Imperial Bedrooms does not, however, function straightforwardly as a literary continuation. Rather, it is a complex remake of the original book. Structural similarities to the first book point to this complicated fusion of sequel and remake. Set two decades after Less Than Zero, Clay has returned from New York to Los Angeles for four months. The characters are indeed older. Yet the names of the characters, the Los Angeles setting, and the architecture of the novel (short sections written in minimalist prose) function to create a narrative that appears to be a self-reflexive echo of Less Than Zero. The architecture of the novel constitutes a reconstructive narratological framework. For Ellis, this reconstructive technique is one aspect of the novel that is fundamental to his act of underwriting the politics of America in the period 2003 to 2009. Repetition is a central part of Ellis’s critique in Imperial Bedrooms. The novel opens with the citation of Elvis Costello’s song “Beyond Belief”: “History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats . . .” Ellis’s structural duplication of Less Than Zero within Imperial Bedrooms materializes Costello’s remark and locks the narrative into a deadlock of repetition that denies the events a sense of historical progression. This double bind frames Ellis’s critique of the Second Gulf War as a repeated event, which is applied both structurally and figuratively in Imperial Bedrooms. The characters in the novel have the names and the surface identities of the original characters in Less Than Zero. In Imperial Bedrooms, however, they now stand

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for America’s corporate and political elite. Writing in 2003, Noam Chomsky drew the parallel of the then-current Washington elite with the Reagan administration of the 1980s: leading figures in the re-declared “war on terror” played a predominant part in its precursor. The diplomatic component of the current phase is led by John Negroponte, who was Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras, the base for terror atrocities for which his government was condemned by the World Court and for U.S.-backed state terror elsewhere in Central America, activities that “made the Reagan years the worst decade for Central America since the Spanish conquest.”1

Chomsky’s observation of the violence exerted on Central America in the Reagan years informs an understanding of Ellis’s political allusions in Imperial Bedrooms, which draws attention to the recidivistic nature of a new climate of American neoimperialism in relation to the neoliberalist policies of the 1980s. Imperial Bedrooms involves a conf luence of two central concerns: the duplicitous politics surrounding the U.S. intervention in Iraq and the violence and exploitation of Hispanic immigrants in a climate of border enforcement. The title of the novel functions to foreground the narrative in two respects. Only a slight deviation from Costello’s album Imperial Bedroom (1982), which was a sequel to the album Trust (the poster for which hung over Clay’s bed in the first novel), the title establishes its correlative relation to Less Than Zero. Secondly, it manifests the novel’s underwritten critique of American neoimperialism. Under the veil of the beau monde of the Los Angeles film industry, Imperial Bedrooms operates as an exposition of that which Neil Smith views as being the third movement of U.S. global ambition. Smith refers to the term “American Lebensraum,” used by the State Department geographer Isaiah Bowman to describe “the Roosevelt administration ambitions for a US-led global settlement after the Second World War.” In light of America’s history of global imperialist strategies, Smith argues that while oil and terrorism are indeed part of the process, the U.S.-led wars against Afghanistan and Iraq need to be viewed as “wars designed to complete the work of that strain of globalization that has characterized the third movement of U.S. ambition since the 1980s.”2 The novel reveals a complex web of power relations between characters who function as literary tropes of key figures in the Bush

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administration. Leo Panitch comments on the industrial-military strains within the Washington elite in 2003: Those branches of the American state controlling and dispensing the means of violence are now in the driver’s seat; in an administration representing a Republican Party that has always been made up of a coalition of free-marketers, social conservatives and military hawks, the balance has been tilted decisively by September 11 towards the latter.3

The characters’ interactions and the subjective violence that occurs as a result of their relations can be read as revealing the objective violence of what has been termed the military-industrial complex and America’s unilateralism. The novel, in its ambiguity and narrative ellipsis, evolves as it progresses into a reticulation of protean narratives. Julian perhaps enunciates the reader’s predicament while tacitly commenting on America’s invasion of Iraq: “[M]aybe this wasn’t thought out enough. Maybe there were too many . . . I don’t know . . . variables . . . that I didn’t know about” (IB, 119). In the composition of Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis creates a narrative space that is a minefield of variables. In doing so, he points to what David Harvey has perceived to be “the clutter of disinformation and the perpetually shifting arguments”4 that characterized the political discourse of the Bush administration post-2003. “[N]one of these lines are secure,” (IB, 74) Blair explains to Clay at one point in the novel when he questions why they cannot talk over the phone. The salient meaning of Blair’s statement is that the lines of telecommunication might be tapped. There might be listeners whom Blair and Clay are unaware of. But the idea of insecure lines also connotes the borderlines between the inside space of the movie industry and the other, external [non-elite] space and, by extension, the borders between the U.S. and its neighboring states as well as other global borders. It also refers to the narrative lines of the novel. The lines of the narrative often cross over and the characters speak in a series of codes. In response to Clay’s claim that “[e]verybody lies,” Julian explains, “[i]t’s just a code,” “It’s just another language you need to learn” (IB, 24). Clay describes himself as appearing “as calm as a cipher” (IB, 26). This perpetual encoding narrows the borders of communication between the characters. Whereas in the earlier narratives the phatic code of communication was broken, in Imperial Bedrooms, the characters encode their discourse in order to disable

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the other’s understanding. In describing himself as a cipher, Clay suggests that Ellis’s novel is a code, the conversion of Less Than Zero into another type of information. The formation of Imperial Bedrooms is a dialectics of conflict whereby a plethora of conflicting narratives are also narratives of conflict.

Narrative Exploits Imperial Bedrooms opens with a prologue in which Clay reflects on the former representations of himself and his group of friends in both Less Than Zero and the consequent film adaptation of the book. This prelude, written in the past tense, locates a conflict between a figure he refers to as “the writer” and himself as the narrator. Unlike Lunar Park, “the writer” in Imperial Bedrooms is not conceived at the outset as an aspect of Clay’s consciousness. Rather, he is a figure in the social collective of Less Than Zero, whom Clay regards with contempt as having manipulated and exploited that social collective in the depiction of the events of Less Than Zero. In Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis is continuing his metaphysical inquiry into the nature of truth and fiction. Pitching the realism of Less Than Zero against the inauthenticity of the film adaptation, Clay explains that the book “was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren’t changed and there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened” (IB, 1). In a testimonial that echoes the preliminary narrative of Lunar Park, Clay lists key events that had taken place. He states that there had been a screening of a snuff movie and reports: “I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author had tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were fake,” but, Clay adds, “[h]e was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away” (IB, 3). A contradiction arises here between Clay’s testimony and the narrative of Less Than Zero, as the figure of the author does not appear in the scene with the snuff movie in the first book. This contradiction inaugurates the insecurity of Clay’s narrative with regard to the truth of his testimony. He lists other examples, including the gang rape of the twelve-year-old girl: I was in that room in West Hollywood with the writer, who in the book noted just a vague reluctance on my part and failed accurately to describe how I had actually felt that night—the desire, the shock, how afraid I was of the writer, a blond and isolated boy whom the girl I was dating had halfway fallen in love with. (IB, 3)

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Clay’s recollections reconfigure the events of the narrative of Less Than Zero in a way that rewrites his character as a victim of the author’s embellishment. Clay’s description of the writer as a sadist is followed by his allegation that because the writer was “too lost in his own passivity” to return Blair’s love for him, she turned to Clay. This is why, according to Clay, he became “the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness” (IB, 4). In this self-compassionate preamble, Clay enacts a displacement of his apparent identity in Less Than Zero onto the writer, dispossessing himself of any responsibility for the ethically questionable events that took place in original book. Up to this point, Clay’s narrative has authority. Even though the reader is aware of the evident irony that the writer whom Clay is referring to is also the writer of Imperial Bedrooms, the writer is kept at a distance, referred to in the third person and subordinated to the first-person narrative of Clay. Indeed, in Clay’s assertion of his individualism, set apart from the writer’s portrayal of him, he attempts to undermine the writer and construct himself as a subject apart from the Clay of Less Than Zero. Through a violent Dostoevskian narrative intervention, Ellis retaliates to reassert his dominant position in the dialogic power relations: That’s how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That’s how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That’s how I became the boy who wouldn’t save a friend. That’s how I became the boy who couldn’t love the girl. (IB, 4)

Clay’s use of anaphora parallels Clay’s use of negative anaphora that he used to identify himself at the outset of Less Than Zero. Defining himself against the writer’s portrayal of him, Clay’s textual authority diminishes as the gap between Clay of Imperial Bedrooms and Clay of Less Than Zero is collapsed through the anaphoric repetition. Furthermore, replace “boy” with “man” in this passage and the description reads as an outline of his character in the central narrative of Imperial Bedrooms. This predicates Ellis’s instrumentalism in Imperial Bedrooms. As an isolated incident, Clay could be seen as parodying the writer here, yet this merger is a repeated event. Toward the end of Clay’s tirade, there is another clear instance of this narrative violence. Ellis has Clay disappear again, first into his own narrative in Less Than Zero: “I told myself it shouldn’t bother me, but the success of the first book hovered within my sight lines for an

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uncomfortably long time” and then into a reflection of Bret, another of Ellis’s duped narrators, “[i]t was my life and he had hijacked it” (IB, 6). In these instances, the authenticity of Imperial Bedrooms disappears and appears as a repetition of Less Than Zero. Baudrillard commented in 2002 that war would be no solution to the events of 9/11, “since it merely offers a rehash of the past.” He compares it to the first Gulf War, arguing that it would be “a non-event, an event that does not really take place.”5 At the moments that Clay’s narrative dissolves into his former narrative, Imperial Bedrooms reads as a nonnarrative, Clay as a narrator dematerializes, and the novel appears as nothing more than “a rehash of the past.” In the opening pages then, a dialectics of exploitation is inscribed in the narrative framework of Imperial Bedrooms. Clay’s reflections recast the writer as a vindictive character. Recalling his monologue in The Rules of Attraction, he states: “There’s a chapter in his second novel, which takes place at Camden, where he parodies Clay—just another cruel reminder of how he felt about me” (IB, 5). Yet Clay is unaware both that this exploitation and parody is at work within his new narrative and of his subordinate position within the narrative of Imperial Bedrooms. In his very attempt to displace his deficiencies onto the writer as other, the unseen author in the position of control violently retaliates through having Clay’s depiction of the writer recoil, revealing Clay to be the petty author of his own testimony. This is revealed in Clay’s depiction of Julian. Clay cuttingly remarks that Julian reacted very differently to the writer’s exposure of him. Despite his heroin addiction and prostitution being laid bare in Less Than Zero, Clay claims “[t]here was something about the book being widely read and costarring Julian that seemed to give Julian some kind of focus that bordered on hope and I think he was secretly pleased with it because Julian had no shame—he only pretended he did” (IB, 6). The movie version of the book, according to Clay, excited Julian even more. These comments complicate Clay’s narrative further as he states that the book was something he couldn’t “disavow,” whereas the movie was nothing but “a beautiful lie” (IB, 7). Having opened Imperial Bedrooms by criticizing the coldness and immorality with which the writer portrayed him, Clay proceeds to hypocritically criticize the film adaptation for suddenly turning him into “the movie’s moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone’s drug use and trying to save Julian” (IB, 7). In Clay’s self-conscious comparison of the book and the film adaptation, it becomes clear that neither representation offers stable points of reference for his identity.

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Indeed, Ellis’s novel is a narrative of reflexivity between fiction and film script. Blair echoes the problem of Clay’s identity within the context of Clay’s self-delusion in the novel: “What you really want to be” she tells him, “doesn’t exist” (IB, 127). Indeed, if Clay existed outside of the book and the film, each representation would be an expropriation of his identity. As a fictional character, Clay’s identity as such is enslaved to the author’s representation of him. His imprisonment within the boundaries of narrative space is reinforced by his physical reflection in Imperial Bedrooms. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he describes himself as simply “an old-looking teenager” (IB, 64). The framework of Imperial Bedrooms functions as an exploitative apparatus. Ellis’s domination of Clay from a clandestine position within the framework of the narrative is a form of objective violence, undermining the authenticity and individualism that Clay lays claim to at the outset. Hannah Arendt remarked that, “Marx’s transformation of the social question into a political force is contained in the term ‘exploitation’, that is, in the notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a ‘ruling class’ which is in the possession of the means of violence.”6 Ellis’s authorship operates from a position correlative to Marx’s “ruling class.” In Clay’s central narrative following the prologue, this notion of exploitation is extended from class relations to imperial relations to reveal how the corporate and political elite exercise this domination and use the “means of violence” for their political gain.

Fame and Imperium In the final lines of his narrative prologue, Clay contrasts Julian’s death in the film adaptation of Less Than Zero to his “real” death in Imperial Bedrooms, a gruesome murder in which Julian’s corpse was so horrifically altered from his living body that the students who found it mistook it for an American flag (IB, 10). Neil Smith recalls that “[i]n November 2001, U.S. forces seized a rural part of southern Afghanistan near Kandahar, and in a staged display jubilant marines hoisted an American flag on the highest point of the terrain.” This act, Smith observes, was a clear deliberate reference “to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders on San Juan Hill at the dawn of the first moment of U.S. global ambition or to U.S. marines on Iwo Jima during the second moment.”7 The violent image of Julian’s corpse resembling the American flag at the outset of Imperial Bedrooms brutally establishes the novel’s subjective violence as the underwritten counterpart to the

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objective violence of American neoimperialism. Furthermore, Clay aligns himself with this act. He admits that he was partly responsible for Julian’s death as, he states, “I’d seen what had happened to him in another and very different movie” (IB, 10). Clay here is referring not just to the snuff movie of Julian’s death, which is sent to him on disk, but also to his movie, the central narrative of Imperial Bedrooms. The narrative break that occurs ten pages into Imperial Bedrooms from past tense to present tense signals the shift into this movie. Clay’s diegetic lexical choices suggest he is in a film narrative for the duration of the novel. Clay, for instance, asks Julian why he is “tracking” his movie (IB, 22), and he describes scenes as playing out (IB, 23) and evenings as sliding into their final acts (IB, 49). This filmlike aesthetic is also evoked by the minimalist style of Clay’s narrative: each short block of prose initiates a different and autonomous scene and the pace of the novel as a consequence is fast, like a thriller. Clay is both the director of his narrative and works as a director in the Los Angeles film industry. His current movie, for which he is holding auditions, is called The Listeners. The film bears a striking resemblance to Ellis’s The Informers, not least because “there’s a vampire in it” (IB, 22). Reenacting Less Than Zero, Clay moves through the exclusive spaces of film industry parties. At one, he describes the scene as “a mosaic of youth, a place you don’t really belong anymore” (IB, 18). Overtly self-conscious of his aging, which is the process of obsolescence in an image-dominated world, Clay attempts to assert, recover, and consolidate his power by bribing young actresses and actors with the promise of fame in return for sex. As the title suggests, sexual relations function in Imperial Bedrooms as objective correlatives of American neoimperial relations. The sexual politics of the novel reflect an imperialist discourse between those in the movie industry, producers, and directors who hold the power of entry into their world, and the actresses and actors who need to obtain a part in the movies to gain access into that world. Clay’s relations with the aspiring actresses are exemplary of the exploitative relations. He details a scene at lunch with an actress at Comme Ça. The power of conquering her stimulates him, while the young actress, aware of the imminent exchange, is draining glasses of champagne. Clay reports: “I’ve had nothing to drink because something else in the lunch is working for me. She needs to take this to the next level if anything is ever going to pan out for her” (IB, 28). He reports a selfprofitable outcome: “We spend an hour at the condo on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza. That’s all it requires. Afterwards she says she feels disconnected from reality. I tell her it doesn’t matter” (IB,

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28). Clay’s disregard for the actress’s sense of displacement after his invasion of her body is contrasted with his own self-consciousness: “I’m blushing,” he admits, “when she tells me how nice my hands are” (IB, 28). In a similar instance of exploitation, Clay reports having bribed the boyfriend of an actress he wanted but who was not interested in him because there was nothing he could offer her. He took the boy up to the Doheny Plaza (IB, 39). During their encounter, the boy’s BlackBerry kept flashing. After the incident, Clay tells us that his girlfriend overdosed on her meds. The threats that Clay makes to his victims align political coercion with sexual coercion. Edwin Schur, in his study on gender violence, has remarked that “[t]he magnitude of coercive sexuality in America today greatly exceeds what one should expect to find in a humane and liberated society.”8 Schur’s essay uncovers the “systemic aspect of sexual coercion” 9 in contemporary American society and views instances of sexual coercion as being to a considerable extent integral to the sexual and social systems “rather than departures from them.”10 Clay’s apartment signals his imperialist interests. All of his sexual conquests take place in the condo in the Doheny Plaza or in the desert. Edward L. Doheny was the first oil tycoon to drill successfully in the Los Angeles Oil Field. He was also known for his acts of bribery. In having Clay perform violent imperialist sexual acts in the Doheny Plaza, Ellis underwrites the duplicity of the intentions of the Bush administration regarding the invasion of Iraq. Clay’s acts are acts of exploitation partly because he is fully aware that his claims that he will ensure fame for the actresses who agree to the exchange are false. In most cases, Clay is aware from the outset that the actress involved will not get the part she believes she is trading her body for. All the instances of Clay’s sexual exploitation manifest the pursuit of Clay’s self-interest at the expense of considerable damage to the person he is violating. Clay’s unilateralism is underlined by Julian’s comments. In reference to Rain, Julian says to Clay: “[Y]ou’ve done this so many times before . . . it’s a joke.” He tells him “[y]ou’re lying all the time,” “[y]ou really won’t do anything for anybody . . . Except yourself’ ” (IB, 159). In the genesis of Imperial Bedrooms, in the relation between exploited and exploiter, Ellis weaves two strands of exposure and latency. Rain and Clay embody these two opposing modalities. Rain works at a club called Reveal. Clay’s previous movie was called Concealed. Clay first encounters Rain at a party. She steps out of the shadows, an unseen place, literally revealing herself to him. The situation Clay finds himself in with Rain is one he knows well. Rain

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wants a part in The Listeners. Their next encounter is at the auditions for the movie. After her audition, he puts his routine into play by suggesting he’ll get her the part. During their exchange, he remarks: “[S]he’s charming but there’s something rehearsed about the charm, something brittle. The smile seems innocent only because there is something lurking along its borders” (IB, 41). Clay’s language, his suspicion that Rain’s smile has something “lurking along its borders” points both to Clay’s political paranoia of those who live outside of his space and to Rain’s double identity. Clay acknowledges that Rain is good at handling “the transparency of the deal.” “Everything she says,” Clay remarks, “is an ocean of signals,” again underlining the geopolitical nature of their exchange. “Listening to her I realize,” he states, “that she is a lot of girls, but which one is talking to me?” (IB, 42). The “pics” that Rain sends Clay similarly reflect her ambiguity. The ones that Clay considers “boring” which are “sepia-toned, shadowy or posed” signal the underside of Rain’s surface identity that Clay chooses to ignore. The others are either “sleazy” or “arousing” (IB, 44) and it is these pictures that Clay allows to construct the identity that he imposes on her. Like everything that Rain says, Clay reads the “pics” as coded, containing a latent and valuable meaning. Every one of them is an invitation, he claims, “[e]very one of them plays on the idea that exposure can ensure fame” (IB, 44). Rain’s looks, Clay observes during their first exchange, are her “currency” in Los Angeles (IB, 40). In terms of an economic exchange, the pictures that Rain sends Clay replace dollar bills, they materialize her currency, her looks, into a set of hard exposures. This currency allows Rain to gain access to the private spaces of the Los Angeles film industry. Put another way, exposure gains entry to clandestine spaces. Yet “currency” also refers to the duration of time something is in operation, and this definition also applies to Rain. At 23, she is already too old for the part she is auditioning for in The Listeners. When Rain’s looks expire, so too will her market value. In both respects, Rain’s “currency” offers Clay the opportunity to possess beauty and youth, both of which he no longer has. Rain’s photographs embody what Clay conceives to be a form of alterity, which he sees as lacking in his world. He contrasts what the photographs offer to the social mundanity of the cocktail party that he attends: “[N]o one says anything nearly as interesting as what Rain’s pictures promise.” He perceives the pictures as offering “a tension, an otherness, that’s lacking in the suite overlooking Sunset” (IB, 44). It is this “otherness” that Clay desires to seek and control. Clay’s

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language, his notions of “otherness,” of danger “lurking” along “borders,” inscribe his contemporary world with a colonial rhetoric and point to a neoimperialist attitude. The desirable “otherness” for Clay is located in an unknown space, the “shadows” that Rain emerges from, which exist outside of the exclusive spaces of the Los Angeles film industry. The closed private spaces in which the elite move in the novel point to a privatization of democracy. There is a complex discourse taking place between the privatization of democracy in the novel and the process of sexual discrimination that Shulamith Firestone in 1970 called “sex privatization,”11 which Schur summarizes as “[e]quating women with their sexuality.”12 Rain is considered by all the male characters in the novel to be desirable, and the novel pivots around the attempts to possess her by Clay, Rip, Julian, and a host of other white male members of the elite. Her stage name, Rain, suggests that she embodies an important resource (as Julian’s surname “Wells” suggests the excavated site of that resource). Indicating water, her name suggests a link between her suitors’ objectives and the water privatization policy of the World Bank. This is further suggested by the aesthetic of Reveal, the club that Rain works in, which Clay describes as “vaguely Peruvian” (IB, 47). In contrast, the film industry after-party that Clay attends is at a hotel called the Roosevelt (IB, 16), clearly a space that signals imperialist interests. To attend the cocktail party, he had to sign a confidentiality agreement (IB, 44), a requirement that highlights the inviolability of the private spaces, in contrast to Reveal. Another after-party for a premiere Clay attends has to be moved to a “less accessible but larger venue” (IB, 28). The notion of larger parties yet less access to those parties, gestures toward a political formula of expanding the privatization of space while decreasing entry into that that space. The border then, in Imperial Bedrooms, is between exposure (other space) and latency (elite space). When Clay approaches Rain in Reveal, he understands himself to be crossing a border. As he walks over to where Rain is working as a hostess, he states, “I realize it is time to cross the line” (IB, 49). Crossing the border is easy for Clay. Clay’s friends lightheartedly reproach him for his conduct, and in doing so, draw the connection between Clay’s exploits with women and the exploitation of immigrants. Wayne comments, in a tone that exhibits bigotry and disdain for those economically and politically disadvantaged, “[o]n a daily basis there’s a whole new army of the retarded and eager to be defiled.” Taking note of Clay’s “uninflected” voice, Wayne comments further, “I guess it makes sense. You’ve been involved in some high-profile hits” (IB, 48). “Hits”

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here double-voices the idea of commercially successful films with the notion of imperial targets. Coming from the other side, the border poses severe dangers. Jon, the director of The Listeners, is having problems with the unwholesome appearance of the girls, as they no longer fit the eighties’ aesthetic. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he says, “[t]hese girls are disappearing” (IB, 38). Actresses starve themselves to get the parts; one actress “passed out” on the way to her car after an audition because of stress and malnutrition (IB, 38). Before her audition for The Listeners, Rain is described as “fasting” (IB, 137). Clay details two actresses that approach him at the doors of Reveal as “paper thin” (IB, 47). Implicit in this description is the notion that the girls function as paper, a global commodity, and that it is their thinness that acts as their immigration papers. A successful crossing brings recognition and the promise of an American identity. This principle of entry is obliquely stated in the hotel ad line that Clay passes that reads “Sea and be seen” (IB, 46). Clay remarks of the actress who overdosed: “Since she had a small role in a hit TV show her death was recognized” (IB, 39). The parallel of the relations between the producers and actresses and the relations between the U.S. and its border states in the period 2003–2009 is clear. This merger is indicated explicitly in the CNN footage of Amanda Flew, one of the aspiring actresses who is murdered and tortured in the novel when she attempts to flee Los Angeles. In memorial to the actress’s death, CNN screens “a montage of Amanda’s brief career with ‘Girls on Film’ playing on the soundtrack as the piece segues into the dangers of the drug wars across the border” (IB, 174). The merger of Amanda’s career with the dangers of the drug wars implies a conflation of wars across the border with the careers of the girls. Trafficking of young actors and actresses into the Los Angeles film industry in Imperial Bedrooms is also fueled by imperial (sexual) consumption, which, as Clay shows, is born from a desire to violate and control “otherness.” Julian has capitalized on the fear of exposure that paradoxically permeates the industry, aptly described by Clay as “the community” (IB, 66). Julian runs a “very exclusive, superdiscreet . . . service,” that appears to function as a sex trafficking business rather than a prostitution business. The service is marketed on its invisibility from global space: “You can’t find it on the Net,” Rip tells Clay, “it’s just wordof-mouth referrals . . . comparatively expensive, but you’re paying for the low-key and the no records and how totally anonymous it is” (IB, 85). As one of Julian’s escorts, Rain’s identity is hidden from the Internet. In order to find details of Rain’s identity, Clay crosses

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another line, from private space to cyberspace, a space with no borders, the diametrically opposite space to the controlled elite spaces of Clay’s world. Clay looks up Rain’s profile on IMDb but it offers limited information. Rain’s identity on the web is illegitimate; her real name, Dr. Woolf reveals to Clay, is Denise Tazzarek. The lack of borders in the uncensored, uncontrolled space of the net is considered highly dangerous to those who inhabit the elite spaces. Clay reports that after Kelly’s body is found, rumors of a video of Kelly Montrose’s “execution” had been “circulating on the Web”: Supposedly there was a headless body in a black windbreaker hung from a bridge, a bleak desert lined with scrub brush beneath it, police tape whipping in the dry wind, and someone else wrote that the murder was set in a “laboratory” outside of Juárez and someone else countered with certainty that the murder was committed in a soccer field by men wearing hoods and someone else wrote No, Kelly Montrose was killed in an abandoned cemetery. But there’s nothing to substantiate any of it. (IB, 66)

The various blogs and rumors are undermined by their multiplicity and the lack of any incriminating evidence. A cover-up is suggested by the fact that the first link “that led to another link” had “been pulled.” The result is that “[t]he justification for the gossip surrenders to the reality” (IB, 67). The elimination of truth through the control of information is the political reality that the public communities on the web are subject to. Yet the web remains a dangerous space of politically negative exposure that must be kept under constant surveillance. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Internet became the site of political opposition and exposure. While the evidence is successfully hidden in the case of Kelly Montrose, it nevertheless remains the only forum in which his “execution” takes place. The surreptitious nature of Julian’s business uses the web to masquerade his clients. His business both privatizes access to the actors and actresses whom he rents to wealthy clients and subsequently it commodifies privacy. Rip tells Clay that the service is anonymous to protect the escorts, “to make sure that if they ever became Brad Pitt there’s no hard evidence that they were involved in anything like this” (IB, 85). However, latent in Rip’s comments is the understanding that the service only offers protection for the escorts once they become part of the elite, until then, they are simply anonymous, stripped of their identity, and exploited in the private spaces of a world in which they are not recognized. This lack of recognition is an important factor in maintaining the master-slave relations of exploiter and exploited. Clay

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acknowledges the signs of a hidden true identity that Rain’s profile on the Internet points to, flagged by the lack of cheerleading photos, her past as a student of medicine, and her connection to Amanda Flew (whom Clay “hit on” in JFK airport), yet he simultaneously comments, “[i]t doesn’t matter if any intelligence actually exists because it’s really all about the look, the idea of a girl like this, the promise of sex. It’s all about the lure” (IB, 51). In a telling passage, Clay details their time together. Rain’s passive supplication is evident: Rain simply nods when I tell her everything that’s wrong with the movie we’ve just seen and she doesn’t argue back. “I liked it,” she will say, putting a light touch on everything, her upper lip always provocatively lifted, her eyes always drained of intent, programmed not to be challenging or negative. This is someone trying to stay young because she knows what matters to you is the youthful surface. This is supposed to be part of the appeal: keep everything young and soft, keep everything on the surface, even with the knowledge that the surface fades and can’t be held together forever—take advantage before the expiration date appears in the nearing distance. The surface Rain presents is really all she’s about, and since so many girls look like Rain another part of the appeal is watching her try to figure out why I’ve become so interested in her and not someone else. (IB, 54)

This passage indicates Clay’s reduction of Rain. The idea that she’s “programmed” into a manner that is utterly non-retaliative, that she is intentionally keeping everything on the surface to satisfy Clay’s desire for passive youth reveals a clear exploitative relationship between Clay and Rain. In this scene, there is a clear social acting out of male sexual aggression and female sexual passivity. That Clay conceives Rain to be just a sexually desirable surface, that what she presents “is really all Rain’s about,” exposes the ideological violence that Clay inflicts on her. This is furthered when Rain tries to impart information about herself to him that he coldly believes “in the bedroom on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza, has no reason to even exist” (IB, 54). Underwritten here is Clay’s denial of Rain’s own right to exist as anything but his fantasy within the private space of the Doheny Plaza, which Clay controls. Schur comments, “[a] psychological distancing from the other person enables the abuser to disregard the latter’s wishes and feelings.” Significantly, he observes, “[t]he same basic point has been made regarding the same relative ease of killing people through high-altitude bombing and other even more detached techniques of modern warfare.”13 Clay outrightly ignores why Rain

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left Lansing at seventeen and “the casual hints of an abusive uncle.” Rain’s gesture of intimacy, of revealing a trauma, Clay reads as “a made-for-sympathy move” that “threatens to erase the carnality” (IB, 54-5). He details what has clearly been a personal struggle for Rain and concludes: “Decoding everything, you piece together the agent who ignores her. You begin to understand through her muted complaints that the management company no longer cares. Her need is so immense that you become surrounded by it.” Rather than eliciting an empathetic response in Clay, Clay sees Rain’s suffering as an opportunity for power, “[t]his need is so enormous,” he states, “that you realize you can actually control it, and I know this because I’ve done it before” (IB, 55). Clay’s empowered reaction to Rain’s suffering is shown more forcibly when Clay bribes her to go over to the apartment before her audition and violently abuses her. During this disturbing scene, he comments, “[e]ven though I thought she was numb from the tequila she keeps crying and that makes me harder. ‘You feel this?’ I’m asking her. ‘You feel this inside you?’ I keep asking, the fear vibrating all around her” (IB, 137). Clay’s sexual arousal in this scene is clearly precipitated by his invasion of Rain’s body and her resulting suffering and powerlessness. Rain shows an understanding of the violence and corruption that is taking place in the elite spaces and the power that the members of this sector exert over others. After her dream in which she sees the boy with the dragon tattoo in Clay’s kitchen bare his teeth then turn to dust, Clay warns her that at night, vampires hide in the palm trees, wait for the lights to go out, and then enter and haunt the hallways of the Doheny Plaza. Rain immediately corrects him, subverting Clay’s claim to persecution from outsiders. In a statement that recalls the vampire trope of Ellis’s earlier novels, Rain murmurs, “[t]he vampires don’t roam the hallways . . . The vampires own the units” (IB, 61). Clay himself identifies with the figure of the vampire, stating at a party, “[i]t’s that time of the night when I’ve entered the dead zone and I’m not coming out,” (IB, 22−3) and extends the metaphor to encompass the elite collective when he tells Julian that at a premiere he had attended, there had been “[n]ot a soul in sight” (IB, 22). Rain’s correction of Clay rightly displaces his sense of victimization, understanding those members of the elite as exerting violence over and indeed feeding off the people who inhabit the spaces that they control. Indeed, The Listener’s Julian remarks, is “all about control” (IB, 22). When Clay arrogantly dismisses his film as unimportant, Julian reprimands him: “Maybe for others it’s something else . . . Something more meaningful” (IB, 22). The infrastructure of Imperial Bedrooms

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is split between Clay’s script, which details his struggle for control and ownership of Rain (and the violence he inflicts as a result of that struggle), and the script that is taking place around him, which involves his friends and the series of murders that take place outside the elite spaces. These acts of violence are directly connected to and indeed generated by the relations within the movie industry/government space. The clandestine internal figure whose infinite presence effects relations and generates conflict is Rip Millar.

The Violence of Reconstruction A key figure in the clandestine networks that operate in the novel, Rip embodies the objective violence of reconstructive practices. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that Clay’s unilateralist imperialist violations of the actresses and Rip’s underhanded dealings work in unison and are mutually beneficial to each of their pursuits of self-interest. Clay describes his first encounter with Rip: I don’t recognize Rip at first. His face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it’s a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized. The lips are too thick. The skin’s orange. The hair is dyed yellow and carefully gelled. He looks as if he has been dipped in acid; things fell off, skin was removed. It’s almost defiantly grotesque. He’s on drugs, I’m thinking. He has to be on drugs to look like this. Rip’s with a girl so young I mistake her for his daughter but then I remember Rip doesn’t have any children. The girl has had so much work done that she looks deformed. Rip had been handsome once and his voice is the same whisper it was when we were nineteen. (LP, 31)

Rip’s cosmetic surgery manifests the violence on both sides of the border. It is simultaneously a grotesque exaggeration of the plastic surgery that the Los Angeles inhabitants undergo to preserve their youth and it resembles the victims of the tortures that take place in the novel. Clay reports a horrific story that circulates at one of the parties, which extends into talk of “a barrel of industrial acid containing human remains” (IB, 45). When Kelly Montrose’s body was found, his face was “peeled off” (IB, 61). Clay describes Rain’s face during his abuse of her as “an anguished mask” (IB, 138). Rip’s face merges these atrocities with the cosmetic surgery practices of the privileged elite. His visage literally and figuratively represents the violence of reconstruction. Rather than simply acting as a comment on the shallowness of a society that undergoes such practices as cosmetic

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surgery, Rip’s face implies interrelations between the American political elite, the border violence, and tortures and the violence inflicted on foreign communities in places such as Mexico and Iraq as a result of the reconstruction practices of companies such as Bechtel and Halliburton. Reconstructive surgery functions for Rip as a way to conceal his true identity. Žižek comments on the “tremendous pressure . . . which compels women in our liberal society to undergo such procedures as plastic surgery, cosmetic implants and Botox injections in order to remain competitive in the sex market.”14 Rip paradoxically uses the altering surgery as a mask in such a way that reconstruction itself becomes a mask hiding other interests. Thus the competition of the sex market not only fuels Rip’s underground exploits but ensures the concealment of his identity. Furthermore, in its androgyny, his face personifies indeterminacy. His indeterminacy is self-protective; everything that unfolds in the novel relates back to Rip, yet he evades any evidence to implicate him. Further to this, Rip’s outward appearance can be read as a manifestation of the notion of exploitation understood by Horkheimer and Adorno as being inflicted by those at the top who “spasmodically dominate nature.”15 Drawing the link between the Frankfurt School’s notion of exploitation and Marx’s critique of political economy, Žižek articulates the paradox that Horkheimer and Adorno perceived in Dialectic of Enlightenment in which “they show how domination over nature necessarily entails the class domination of people over other people.”16 The work the young girl has had done, which makes her look deformed, manifests Rip’s practice of reconstruction/violation of others. In Rip, the face of reconstruction is simultaneously the face of political concealment and exploitation. Rip’s reconstruction practices can be read as implicitly alluding to the underside of the reconstruction practices by American construction companies such as Halliburton and Bechtel, notorious for their ties in Washington among the political elite of the Bush administration. The Bechtel Group won a $680 million contract to lead the reconstruction of Iraq in 2003. The New York Times reported in 2003: “Bechtel has longstanding ties to the national security establishment—both for the work it has done and the men who have served in its ranks.”17 The article gives the examples of George P. Shultz, who, before taking up the post of secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, was Bechtel’s president. Shultz worked alongside Caspar W. Weinberger, who similarly served as an executive at Bechtel before being appointed defense secretary. President Bush, in 2003,

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appointed the chief executive of Bechtel, Riley P. Bechtel, to work for the president’s Export Council.18 A report in The Independent in 2007 stated: The largest beneficiary of reconstruction work in Iraq has been KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), a division of US giant Halliburton, which to date has secured contracts in Iraq worth $13bn (£7bn), including an uncontested $7bn contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure. Other companies benefiting from Iraq contracts include Bechtel, the giant US conglomerate, BearingPoint, the consultant group that advised on the drawing up of Iraq’s new oil legislation, and General Electric. According to the US-based [Center] for Public Integrity, 150-plus US companies have won contracts in Iraq worth over $50bn.19

Bechtel has also been heavily involved in water privatization. Perhaps the most controversial contract was Bechtel’s 1999 contract with Hugo Banzer to privatize the water in the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city. As a result of the privatization of the city’s water, the water rates went up 50 percent. When Bolivia withdrew the contract as a result of economic collapse, Bechtel proceeded to sue Bolivia for $25 million. Rip exhibits interest in Iraq and South America along with an interest in corporate investment and domestic politics. When Rip calls Clay, he tells him that he’s lying in bed watching CNN on his laptop, “images of a mosque in flames, ravens flying against the scarlet sky” (IB, 68), showing that his interest extends to the Middle East and the destruction of its cultural and religious iconography. In Less Than Zero, Rip was the book’s prolific drug dealer, and he is clearly connected in Imperial Bedrooms to the Hispanic community and its exploitation. The most powerful figure in the elite, whom the other characters fear, he has his fingers in various underground practices related to his interests. He is often with underage girls. Clay reports seeing him stumbling toward a hotel “clutching a girl in a baby doll dress by the wrist” (IB, 46). As I have commented, dangerously underweight women appear throughout the novel. Julian tells Clay that Rip is somehow “indirectly connected” to a “secret cult that encourages members to starve themselves to death—some kind of torture kick, a how far can you take it?” (IB, 36) Rip’s use of Hispanic language links him to the murders that take place in the novel. When Clay first meets Rip, he tells him “descansado.” It means, he says, “[t]ake it easy” in Spanish (IB, 32). Later in the novel Clay receives threatening texts using Hispanic slang, “Hey

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gringo, you can’t hide” (IB, 109). At the exclusive party in Chateau Marmont, Clay reports that a story has moved through the town “involving a young Hispanic actress whose body was somehow found in a mass grave across the border, and for some reason this is connected to a drug cartel in Tijuana.” The reports of the murders also involved tortures: “Mangled bodies were strewn in the pit. Tongues were cut out.” Clay says the story gets more outlandish as it gets retold. He comments on the barrel of industrial acid, mentioned earlier, and “A body is now dumped in front of an elementary school as a warning, a taunting, a message” (IB, 45). Kelly Montrose, Clay reports, was rumored to have been with the Hispanic actress. The final sighting of Kelly was on a tennis court in Palm Springs. After that, “Kelly’s naked body was smeared across a highway in Juárez and then propped against a tree. Two other men were found nearby entombed in blocks of cement” (IB, 60). Kelly was found with his faced peeled off and his hands were missing, clear indications of cartel-style murders. Yet the note linked to his body implicates a link to Rip: “cabron? cabron? cabron?” And for Clay, Kelly’s connections to the drug cartel seem surprising. The repeated message of “cabron” means nothing to Clay. However, in reference to Rain, Rip later tells Clay, “[s]he’s setting you up, cabron’ ” (IB, 133). “Cabron,” a Mexican term, has a plurality of meanings. On a literal level, it means “goat.” However, it is used violently, in the sense of “asshole-fucker-bitch,” or it can mean “dude, friend.” The double meaning of the term reflects the ambivalence and double-sidedness of Rip’s and Clay’s discourse. Other meanings include cuckold, a treacherous act, or hard to solve. Each meaning is applicable, though none certain. That Kelly’s death was in fact linked to Rain becomes apparent when Rip tells Clay “[t]hat’s what happens when you get involved with the wrong element,” a coded yet clear reference to water, the shared element of desire between the characters. Rip’s corporate involvement is signaled by Clay’s friend, Banks, who tells him that it was Rip who recommended Reveal to him and procured him access: “Rip got us in,” he says (IB, 46). Banks’s name denotes corporate interests (in the Los Angeles industry, he creates reality TV shows) as well as implying the containment of resources (water). Rip’s recommendation indicates an interest in having members such as Banks frequenting Reveal. Rip’s duplicitous political interests are indicated when Clay encounters Rip at the bar in Barney Greengrass, “having lunch with Griffin Dyer and Eric Thomas, a city councilman who resembles a lifeguard, and whom Rip had been complaining about but now seems friendly with” (IB, 70).

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Despite Clay showing hostility toward Rip, and a hypocritical disapproval of Rip’s code of conduct, similarities between the two figures become clear. “I’m like you,” Rip says to Clay, “I don’t trust people” (IB, 84). Trent also remarks to Clay, “[a]ctually . . . you and Rip have a lot more in common than you think” (IB, 144). Clay’s violence is fueled by his involvement with Rip. Rip is the person who tells Clay of Rain’s ties with Julian’s escort service. He generates Clay’s violence and his coercion through attacking his ego. Rip tells Clay that regarding Rain, he isn’t the threat but that Julian is. Kit also refers to Clay’s limited power: “I mean, you’re a nice looking guy for your age,” she says to him, “but you don’t really have the clout” (IB, 47). Kit’s remarks are double-voiced by a narrative intervention from Ellis as this remark reflects and appropriates the comment Blair made to Clay in Less Than Zero, “[y]ou’re a beautiful boy, Clay, but that’s about it” (LTZ, 192). Rip understands that for Clay, it is about owning Rain and controlling her, remarking, “[y]ou have a history of this, don’t you?” (IB, 91) Two incidents apart from the violence that Clay inflicts on Rain and the couple in the desert attest to this. Trent threatens Clay with the disclosure of the violence he inflicted on the actress from Pasadena who lost her baby as a result of the assault (IB, 150). Clay recalls pacing outside the Cedars-Sinai ER on the fourth of July apologizing to Meghan Reynolds, the actress he had an affair with (IB, 111). This instance disconcertingly suggests that Meghan’s plastic surgery, the reconstruction of her face that Clay finds shocking, is in fact a result of his abuse. Clay’s and Rip’s interests begin to work together in the narrative and move toward a bilateral coalition. Clay’s concerns are with achieving domination and control of Rain. Rip wants Rain back in order to maintain structure. He openly admits to Clay that he wants to get rid of Julian “[b]ecause he’s compromising the structure of things” (IB, 136). Both Rip and Julian acknowledge that Clay’s desire for Rain is actually about something else. “Have you ever thought that maybe this—your little freak-out—isn’t about her?” Rip asks Clay, “[t]hat maybe it’s about you?” (IB, 89). Julian similarly asks him, regarding Rain, “Do you really like her, Clay? . . . Or do you like something else?” (IB, 119). Clay however, will not admit that his desire for Rain masks other self-interests, which are clearly transparent to the other characters in the novel. This “something else” of Clay’s interests is disclosed further as the relations between Clay and Rain break down. Rain tells Clay that she lost her job at Reveal because Rip made a call. Upon receipt of this information, Clay reports, “[t]hings start expanding. I feel more relaxed. Everything becomes possible because the plan starts falling into place” (IB, 97). Rain asks him “[h]ow do

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you live like this?” Showing a clear denial of his involvement, Clay simply states, “I pretend that I don’t” (IB, 97). Clay makes one of his many threats to cancel Rain’s audition and describes her reaction: “[S]he immediately moves into me and says she’s sorry and then she’s guiding me toward the bedroom and this is the way I always wanted the scene to play out and then it does and it has to because it doesn’t really work for me unless it happens like this” (IB, 125). When Laurie, Clay’s girlfriend in New York, questions Clay as to why he is displacing her from his flat in New York, he simply tells her, “[e]verything I do is for a reason” (IB, 168). Clay’s comments regarding Rain and Laurie show that his need is for power and control. As the mutual profits to each side increase, Clay and Rip appear to reflect one another in their desire to eliminate Julian. Rip calmly states to Clay on the East Terrace that he wants Rain back and that he might hurt Julian in the process of retrieving her (IB, 90). Following Rip’s statement, Clay leaves a drunken message on Julian’s answering machine threatening to kill him (IB, 98). Rip and Clay materialize in the narrative as two sides of the same coin. The more information Rip imparts to Clay regarding Rain, which increases his insecurity, the more Clay’s violence intensifies, dominated by his need for control. As he does at the outset in his condemnation of the writer of Less Than Zero, Clay refracts his vices onto the other, Rain. Having spoken to Rip, Clay cross-examines Rain regarding her involvement with Kelly. She claims that nothing happened between her and Kelly. He says that he doesn’t believe her, that she must have promised him something. She responds, “[n]ot everyone’s like you.” When she admits that perhaps Kelly wanted something to happen, Clay defends Rip having Kelly killed: “Maybe that explains why Rip got so angry,” Clay says, reporting that while saying this he’s trying to “remain calm,” trying to “rein in” his excitement. “Maybe he felt Kelly was going to make a move on you . . . ” (IB, 124), Clay says in defense of Rip. Clay’s continual use of the adverb “maybe” denotes that there is no hard evidence for his claims. His defense of Rip is built entirely on the hypothesis that Kelly might have been a threat to Rip. His defense implies that if Kelly was a threat, then that threat, the possibility that Kelly might have attempted, in Clay’s mind, to take possession of Rain, fully justifies Rip having him killed. In the latter part of novel, Ellis demonstrates the instability of the political narrative and the narrative itself. Rip tells Clay that “Julian’s disappeared” (IB, 134). Clay meets with Trent, who warns him to stop seeing Rain, and when Clay ignores his warning, tells him “[a]s of now you have officially made yourself a target” (IB, 148). The snuff film of

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Amanda Flew’s torture is posted on the net. Clay watches it and realizes, “[t]his isn’t just about Amanda. I can’t help thinking that it’s happening because of me” (IB, 151). When Julian calls Clay, he tells him that he’s going to secure a deal between Julian and Rip and pay back Julian’s debt to Rip for him (IB, 153). Fueled by Rain’s rejection of him and his envy of Julian, Clay delivers Julian to Rip. Rip is not seen and Julian is dragged away by three young Mexican men, clearly working for Rip (IB, 162). Directly after this, Clay drugs Rain and rapes and beats her repeatedly (IB, 163). Following this scene, Clay takes the girl and the boy that he “bought” to the desert where he abuses and tortures both of them so violently that the girl mentally succumbs, calls the hills, “the crossing place,” and states, “[t]his is where the devil lives” (IB, 166). These details are important, as they illustrate the correlative relation of Rip’s and Clay’s acts of violence. The instability of the narrative becomes clear when Clay reports, “Julian’s body is found dead almost a week after he disappeared, or was kidnapped, depending on which script you want to follow” (IB, 170). Clearly, the two narratives referred to here are Rip’s on the one hand and Clay’s on the other. Rip ultimately dominates as the novel closes. Clay finally realizes that he has been set up. Rip coerces him with false evidence that he was involved in both Julian’s and Amanda’s murders. Rip meanwhile has complete possession of Rain and is expanding his power and influence by opening a new club and going into the movies. Clay is eliminated through Ellis’s process of reconstruction. A final act of coercion sees Blair taking control of Clay as he dissolves back into the narrative of Less Than Zero. Blair remarks to him, “[y]ou don’t look like anything has happened to you,” (IB, 177) and in doing so, declares Clay’s narrative to be a nonevent. Clay’s final lines, in a short section that directly reflects the structure of Ellis’s first book, exhibit a complete tautological regression into the earlier book. Echoing the Epigraph to Less Than Zero: “This is the game that moves as you play,” he asks if Blair, “ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it?” The most important thing he claims that he wants to explain to Blair is that “I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people,” (IB, 178) and in uttering these final lines, disappears into his first enunciation in 1985.

Beyond the Shadows “Don’t try and connect it all . . . ,” Julian told Clay in Imperial Bedrooms, “[t]his isn’t a script. Not everything’s going to come together in the

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third act” (IB, 117). As President Obama begins a long and uncertain process of withdrawing troops in Iraq, while simultaneously extending the shadow war against al-Qaeda and its allies into Yemen and Pakistan, 20 Julian’s words seem to resonate into the contemporary political climate. Julian’s remarks to Clay apply not only to the narrative of which he is a part but also to the climate of conflict of the first decade of the twenty-first century. As I conclude this book in September 2010, Ellis’s attention to the changing nature of the contemporary seems ever more prescient, even though his critique at the present time stops short of the watershed year of 2009. At this point, Ellis’s latest novel is already part of a former era, while, in its structure and concerns, it offers a convoluted narrative that appears to function as a concluding novel in his present oeuvre. It offers a completion, however, that does not serve as an assertion of an absolute but rather as a reassertion of Ellis’s importance as a contemporary writer precisely because of his instability. In underwriting the politics of exposure, Imperial Bedrooms serves to comment on the contemporary writer’s position within the conflicting narratives of our culture. As Žižek observes, Brian de Palma’s Redacted (2007) was boycotted by U.S. audiences for its portrayal of rape and murder “as part of the U.S. army’s obscene subculture, a form of ‘group solidarity’ in collective transgression.”21 Ellis’s act of underwriting is an important mode of expression, as it is itself a method of exposure that succeeds in revealing “the dislocating effects of capitalist globalization which, by undermining the ‘symbolic efficacy’ of traditional ethical structures, creates . . . a moral vacuum.”22 Ellis’s novels are politically correct in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term as, in writing beneath the surface of contemporary culture, Ellis provides the “symbolic efficacy” that it is otherwise lacking. The trajectory of Ellis’s novels unveils the contemporary social conditions of which they are a part from within the reified cultural product of the contemporary novel. Through resisting any imposition of moral authority and by courting hermeneutic variability, Ellis’s novels withstand the forces of cultural reification. As such, his narratives are not static but embody a dialectical space in which contemporary moments are uneasily held in a topology of narratives. By this means, Ellis presents a new literary paradigm. The contemporary writer can capture and underwrite the prevailing sentiments of his time, thereby enacting a form of intervention. With the correlation of political and literary value arises another mutual relation—between interpretation and transformation. Rancière remarks, “[i]nterpretations are themselves real changes, when they transform the forms of visibility a common world may take and, with them, the

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capacities that ordinary bodies may exercise in that world over a new landscape of the common.” Thus, “[t]he phrase that pits the transformation of the world against its interpretation is as much a part of the same hermeneutic apparatus as the ‘interpretation’ it contests.”23 For Rancière, “[t]he new regime of literature that upholds the purity of literature” calls into question “the very sense of the opposition between the interpretation of the world and the transformation of the world.”24 Contemplating the politics of literature, he asserts, can help us understand this ambiguity. Ellis’s mode of intervention inherent in his act of underwriting is specifically literary and offers the reader a politics of literature that opens up new ways of perceiving the contemporary. In order to engage with this politics of literature, the reader needs to read beyond the surface, to recognise, to listen, and to take responsibility for what he or she hears. Ellis offers us the opportunity to reflect on our contemporary culture, to read beneath and beyond the surface of our time.

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Notes

Introduction: Underwriting the Contemporary 1. Theodor Adorno, dedication to Max Horkheimer at the outset of Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 15. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Author As Producer” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others (Cambridge, MA., London: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 79– 96. At the outset, the editors note that the date given in Benjamin’s subtitle—April 28, 1934—is erroneous, as Benjamin wrote to Adorno the next day (April 28, 1934) mentioning in his letter that the address had not yet been presented. The editors add that Gershom Scholem claims that April 27 was the date that the text was completed but that the text in fact was never presented; see The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940 (New York: Shocken, 1989). See note in The Work of Art, 93. 3. Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer,’ 80. 4. Ibid., 81. 5. Ibid. The italics here are Benjamin’s. 6. Ibid., 81. 7. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 80. 8. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 155. 9. Slavoj Žižek conceives of today’s political correctness as the “exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear.” This is addressed most fully in chapter 3. See Žižek Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2009), 35. Žižek also provides a critique of the idealism and political correctness of James Cameron’s Avatar in his article “Return of the Natives” in The New Statesman, March 4, 2010. 10. Žižek, Violence, 85. 11. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 3.

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NOTES

12. Oxford English Dictionary vol. xviii (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1989), 994. 13. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 89. 14. Don DeLillo, “In The Ruins of the Future,” The Guardian, December 22, 2001. 15. Catherine Morley also draws this comparison in “Writing In The Wake of 9/11,” in American Thought and Culture In The TwentyFirst Century, edited by Martin Halliwell and Catherine Morley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 250. 16. DeLillo, “The Power of History” in The New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1997. 17. Ibid. 18. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, , xii. 19. Martin Jay understands this in terms of reification: “For Lukács, it was precisely the inability of the inherently undialectical bourgeoisie to grasp the totality of social relations and overcome the antinomy of appearance and essence that made it ultimately inferior to the proletariat. Only the latter were positioned in society as both the ontological creators and epistemological knower of their creation.” See Martin Jay’s “Introduction” to Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6. 20. Steven Connor, “The Impossibility of the Present,” in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, edited by Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Essex: Longman, 1999), 15−36. 21. Peter Osborne, “The Politics of Time” in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, 45. 22. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 91. 23. John Fante, Ask the Dust (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1998), 173. 24. Ibid. 25. Naomi Mandel and Alain-Philippe Durand (eds.) Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (London: Continuum, 2006), 2. 26. This is an incident of Ellis manipulating his critics. Bret here comically decontextualizes and misquotes the statement. Mailer’s original comments state that “the first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes is written by only a halfcompetent and narcissistic young pen.” Norman Mailer, “Children of the Pied Piper: a Review of American Psycho” in Vanity Fair (Fall 1991), reprinted in The Time of Our Time. London: Little Brown, 1998; 1076. 27. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, Introduction by Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 57. 28. Henrik Skov Nielsen, “ ‘The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction” in Narrative, vol. 12, no. 2, 2004, 133−51. 29. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (London: Penguin, 2008), 7−43.

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30. In chapter 4, I stress that Bret is a construct of the media representations of Ellis and is therefore not Ellis himself. This act of selfparody is critical to an understanding of Lunar Park. To distinguish between the author and the narrator, I refer to Bret, the narrator of Lunar Park, and Ellis, the author of Lunar Park. 31. Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, 91. 32. Ibid., 92. 33. Ellis’s mocking of Adorno is brought to light particularly in chapter 2 of this study in my discussion of American Psycho. Yet the critique can be read throughout Ellis’s work. The emphasis that the characters of Less Than Zero, The Informers and Imperial Bedrooms place on the sun tan is one instance. Adorno remarks in his chapter titled “Free Time”: “In the sun tan, which can be quite fetching, the fetish character of the commodity lays claim to actual people; they themselves become fetishes.” Furthermore he asserts: ‘The act of dozing in the sun marks the culmination of a crucial element of free time under present conditions – boredom’ and this is a boredom that is clearly evident in hyperbole in Less Than Zero and The Informers. Thus whilst Ellis can be seen to employ Adorno’s cultural criticism there is, in the immoderate characteristics of his fiction, grounds for viewing the author as simultaneously ironizing Adorno’s remarks on mass culture. See Theodor Adorno, ‘Free Time’ in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 165. 34. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002), 60. 35. For Žižek repressive desublimation is the condition “characteristic of ‘post-liberal’ societies in which the ‘triumphant archaic urges, the victory of the Id over the Ego, live in harmony with the triumph of the society over the individual.” I return to this in chapter 2. See Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 16. Here Žižek is citing Adorno, ‘Zum Verhältnis von Sociologie und Psychologie’, in Gesellshaftsthoerie und Kulturkritik. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 134. 36. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 255. 37. Marcuse, An Essay On Liberation, (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972), 53. 38. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 86. 39. Tara Baxter and Nikki Craft, “There Are Better Ways of Taking Care of Bret Easton Ellis Than Just Censoring Him . . .” in Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography, edited by Diana E.H. Russell (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), 45−53. 40. Rosa A. Eberly, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 106.

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41. Ibid. 42. Elizabeth Young writes that Patrick “is an entirely democratic killer.” At the end of the novel, he has killed thirty-three victims and has covered “the entire cross-section of race, class, age and gender in New York society.” See Young, “The Beast In The Jungle, The Figure In The Carpet,” in Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney (eds.) Shopping In Space: Essays On American Blank Generation Fiction (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press), 113. 43. James Annesley, Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 22. 44. Cited by Eberly in Citizen Critics, 106. 45. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text” in Speech Genres and Other Later Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004, 112. 46. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 9. 47. Ibid., 187. 48. Ibid. 49. Timothy Bewes, Reification, or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002), 3. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 4. 52. Julian Murphet, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2002), 37. 53. Ibid., 39. 54. See Martin Jay’s “Introduction” to Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, 4. 55. Axel Honneth’s Tanner Lectures in the 2004/2005 year at the University of California, Berkeley. Honneth gave his series of talks on reification at Berkeley in 2005 which were hotly debated. Honneth’s central revision of the concept of reification concerns understanding the importance of recognition. Recognition is the interaction that joins subject and object—reification is in these terms a process of forgetting this primal intersubjective relation. Judith Butler, Jonathan Lear and Raymond Guess responded to Honneth’s lectures. They raised the central concern that Honneth’s notion that the recognition of the primal intersubjective relation would be a recuperative practice was idealistic, that it presupposes that the primal intesubjective relation is necessarily one of love and not hate. Nevertheless Honneth’s contemporary revision of the concept and his idea of remembering as a recuperative practice is important and relevant to the contemporary debates surrounding the subject and to an analysis of Ellis’s novels. See Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 56. See Honneth’s discussion of reification as forgetfulness of recognition, “Reification and Recognition” in Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, 52−63.

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57. Axel Honneth, “Reification and Recognition” in Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, 35. 58. Bewes, Reification, 8. 59. Bewes, Reification, 7. 60. Bewes, Reification, 4. 61. Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 81. 62. Rancière, The Politics of Literature, 7. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Sonia Baelo-Allué’s study, forthcoming at the time of completing this study, titled Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing Between High and Low Culture (London: Continuum, 2011) promises to focus on the reception of each of Ellis’s novels in some detail. 66. Mandel and Durand (eds.) Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (London: Continuum, 2006), 2. Mandel has edited a further volume of essays on Ellis, which is forthcoming at the time of this book’s completion. See Naomi Mandel (ed.), Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park (London: Continuum, 2011). 67. Ibid., 3. 68. Nielsen, “The Impersonal Voice in First-Person Narrative Fiction,” 140. 69. Mandel, “ ‘Right Here in Nowheres’: American Psycho and Violence’s Critique” in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, 9−20; 13. 70. Carla Freccero, “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, (1997), 27. 71. Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 72. Žižek, Violence , 1. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 2. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 5. 78. Ibid., 9. 79. Ibid., 8. 80. Ibid, 174. 81. Alex E. Blazer, “Glamorama, Fight Club, and the Terror of Narcissistic Abjection” in American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture, edited by Jay Prosser (London: Routledge, 2008), 177−89. 82. Ibid., 179 83. Berthold Schoene, “Serial Masculinity: Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho” in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 54, no. 2, 378−97.

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84. Morley, “Writing in the Wake of 9/11” in American Thought and Culture in the Twenty-First Century, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 247. 85. Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 294. 86. Glyn Daly and Slavoj Žižek, Conversations With Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 100. 87. Žižek, Violence, 34. 88. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 356. 89. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2003). First published in 2002. 90. Carl Tighe, Writing and Responsibility (London: Routledge, 2005). 91. Murphet, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 20. 92. Ibid., 19. 1

Missing Persons: Melancholy as Symptom in L ESS T H A N Z ERO , T HE R U L ES OF A T TR ACT ION and T HE I NF OR MER S

1. Elizabeth Young, “Vacant Possession: Less Than Zero – A Hollywood Hell,” in Shopping In Space, 25. 2. Graham Caveney, “Notes Degree Zero: Ellis Goes West” in Shopping in Space, 124. 3. While I resist an interpretation of Ellis’s texts through the early theories of Baudrillard, his later work informs my later discussions of Glamorama and Lunar Park. 4. James Annesley, Blank Fictions, 7. 5. Ibid., 92. 6. Andrew Gibson, “Oublier Baudrillard: Melancholy of the Year 2000” in New Formations: Remembering the 1990s, no. 50, 2003; 134. 7. See Adorno’s “Introduction” to Negative Dialectics: “From the negative the subject withdraws to itself, and to the abundance of its ways to react. Critical self-reflection alone will keep it from a constriction of this abundance, from building walls between itself and the object, from supposition that its being-for-itself is an in-and-for-itself.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 2000) p. 31. 8. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, 294. 9. Ibid. 10. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 15−16. 11. Ibid. 12. See the epigraph to The Rules of Attraction. See also Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (London: Flamingo, 1988), 199. 13. Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 106. 14. Ibid., 103. 15. Gibson, “Oublier Baudrillard,” 123. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 127.

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18. Ibid., 128. 19. Nicki Sahlin, “But This Road Doesn’t Go Anywhere: The Existential Dilemma in Less Than Zero,” in Critique, vol. XXXIII, no. 1, Fall 1991, 26. 20. Sahlin, “But This Road Doesn’t Go Anywhere.” Here Sahlin is citing David J. Geherin’s essay, “Nothingness and Beyond: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays,” Critique, XVI (1974), 64−78. 21. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 42. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Gibson here is citing Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, translated by Priscilla Prankhurst Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 370. See “Oublier Baudrillard,” 129. 27. Gibson here is paraphrasing Pierre Bourdieu, Vontre-feux: Propos pour servir à la résistance contrel’invasionnéo-libérale, (Paris: Raisons d’Agor, 1998), 108−19. See “Oublier Baudrillard,” 129. 28. Gibson, “Thankless Earth, But Not Entirely: Event and Remainder in Contemporary Fiction,” in On the Turn: The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English, edited by Bárbara Aritzi and Silvia Martínez-Falquina (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 3. 29. Ibid. 30. Gibson, “Thankless Earth,” 11. 31. Richard Burton’s definition of melancholy cited by Judith Sklar in her “Foreword” to Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), vii. 32. Gibson, “Thankless Earth,” 11. 33. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 88−89. 34. Ibid., 88. Luckhurst here is referring to Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 42−65. 35. Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 1. 36. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 41. 37. Ibid. 38. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 102. 39. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) in Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: German Socialist Philosophy, edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher (New York: Continuum, 1997), 105. 40. Gibson, “Oublier Baudrillard,” 123.

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41. Julian Murphet, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2002), 12. 42. Ibid., 13. 43. Ibid. 44. Joan Didion, The White Album (London: Flamingo, 1993), 11–12. 45. Ibid., 12–13 46. Ibid., 14. 47. Žižek, Violence, 65. 48. Pamela Thurschwell, “Elvis Costello as a Cultural Icon and Cultural Critic” in Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, (eds.) Kevin J.H. Dettmar and William Richey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 292. Thurschwell’s essay provides a detailed analysis of Elvis Costello as a cultural reference point in Less Than Zero. 49. Axel Honneth, “Reification and Recognition” in Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, 63. 50. Julian Murphet, Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27. 51. Žižek, Violence, 66. 52. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 149. 53. Ibid., 150. 54. Louis Althusser states “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ ” He further remarks: “The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.” “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)” in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 48–49. 55. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 2006), 279. 56. Ibid., 67. 57. Ibid. 58. Žižek, Violence, 35−36. 59. Adorno, ZumVerhältnis, 133, cited by Slavoj Žižek in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 19. 60. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “Introduction” to Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), xv. 61. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 1992), 51. 62. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 20. 63. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 11.

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64. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1989), 121. 65. Ibid. 66. Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, 105. Lepenies here is citing Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kantor (Minneapolis, 1989), 42 and 59. 67. Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, 105. 68. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 19, citing Theodor Adorno’s “ZumVerhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie” in Gesellshaftstheorie und Kulturkritik (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1975), 133. 69. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 159. 70. Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 11. 71. Thurschwell, “Elvis Costello as Cultural Icon and Cultural Critic,” 288. 72. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 39. Here Harvey is citing J. Rapley, Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism’s Downward Spiral (Boulder, CO: Lyne Reiner, 2004), 55. 73. Harvey, A Brief History, 39, citing A. Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks, translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 321−43. 74. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 21. 75. Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 7–8. 76. Murphet, Literature and Race in Los Angeles, 1. 77. Ibid., 2. 78. Ibid. 79. Žižek, Violence, 51. 80. Ibid., 52. 81. Bewes, Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism, 7. 82. Nathan Schwartz-Salant, “The Dead Self in Borderline Personality Disorders” in Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia and Depression, edited by David Michael Levin (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 149. 83. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 294. 84. Veronica Hollinger, “Fantasies of Absence: The Postmodern Vampire” in Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (eds.), Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 201. 85. Ibid., 202. 86. Ibid., 204. 87. The original article by Douglas Martin from March 27, 1964 is cited here, “About New York; Kitty Genovese: Would New York Still Turn Away?” in The New York Times, March 11, 1989. See also A.M. Rosenthal, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

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88. See Manning, R., Levine, M. & Collins, A., “The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable of the 38 Witnesses.” American Psychologist, 62 (6), (2007), 555−62. 89. Bonnie Ruth Strickland (ed.), The Gale Encyclopaedia of Psychology, Second Edition (New York: Gale Group, 2001), 102. 90. Ibid., 103. 91. Ibid. 92. Henry R. Huttenbach, “From the Informed Mind to the Quickened Heart,” University of Minnesota, Genocide Forum, Year 3, no. 7. http://www.chgs.umn.edu/educational/ genocideForum/year3 / no7.html 93. Murphet, Literature and Race in Los Angeles, 85. 94. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 295. 95. Ibid. 96. Lisa Downing, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and NineteenthCentury French Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2003), 1−2. 97. Jonathan P. Rosman, MD and Phillip J Resnick, MD, report that of the 122 cases they studied, out of the true necrophiles 15 percent were motivated by the “attempt to gain comfort, or to overcome feelings of isolation” (159). The authors also note that in modern culture necrophilia has been associated with cannibalism and myths of vampirism: ‘The vampire, who has been romanticized by the Dracula tales, obtains a feeling of power from his victims, ‘like I had taken something powerful from them.’ ” See Jonathan P. Rosman, MD and Phillip J Resnick, MD, “Sexual Attraction to Corpses: A Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia” in The Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law; Vol. 17, No.2, 1989, 153–163; 153 citing vanden Bergh RL, Kelly JF: ‘Vampirism: a Review with New Observations’. Arch Gen Psychiatry 11: 543–7, 1964. 98. Gibson, “Oublier Baudrillard,” 132. 99. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 295. 100. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, vol. XXIII (London: Hogarth Press), 300. 101. Gibson, “Event and Remainder in Contemporary Fiction,” 11. 2

An Inner Critique: Commodity Fetishism, Systemic Violence, and the Abstract Mutilated Subject in A MER IC A N P S YCHO

1. Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera in Brecht: Collected Plays: Two (London: Methuen Drama, 1998), 145. 2. Elizabeth Young, “The Beast in the Jungle, The Figure in the Carpet: Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho” in Shopping in Space, 92 3. Rosa A. Eberly, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 130. 4. Young, “The Beast in the Jungle,” 120.

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5. Naomi Mandel, ‘ “Right Here in Nowheres”: American Psycho and Violence’s Critique’ in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, 9. 6. Todd Stiles, “How Bret Ellis Turned Michael Korda Into Larry Flint” in Spy magazine, December 1990, cited in Eberly, Citizen Critics, 111. 7. Mailer perceived the greatest intellectual damage that could be inflicted by the novel as being the possible reinforcement of Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. He states: “It is the banality of Patrick Bateman that creates his hold over the reader and gives this ugly work its force. For if Hannah Arendt is correct and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic. The extension of Hannah Arendt’s thesis is that we are absurd, and God and the Devil do not wage war with each other over the human outcome. I would rather believe that the Holocaust was the worst defeat God ever suffered at the hands of the Devil. That thought offers more life than to assume that many of us are nothing but dangerous, distorted and no damn good.” For this reason Mailer states “I cannot forgive Bret Easton Ellis.” See Norman Mailer’s “Children of the Pied Piper: a Review of American Psycho” in Vanity Fair, (Fall 1991), reprinted, in The Time of Our Time. London: Little Brown, 1998; 1077. 8. In recent media criticism, the book has received a more positive response from writers such as Gore Vidal and Katherine Dunn. However, these responses tend to focus on the humor of the book rather than acknowledge the complexities and instabilities of Ellis’s work. 9. Bewes, Reification, or, the Anxiety of Late Capitalism, 152. 10. Ibid. 11. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 218. 12. Ibid. 13. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Story and Scandal’ in The Book To Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 190. 14. Ibid. 15. Naomi Mandel, ‘ “Right here in nowheres”: American Psycho and Violence’s Critique’ in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, 9–20. Mandel performs a brilliant critique of both violence in the novels and the discussions of violence in the novel by Marco Abel and Carla Freccero’s essay, “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics 27.2 (1997); 44–8. 16. Abel, “Judgment is not an Exit.” 17. See my discussion of the differing modes of political correctness in the Introduction to this study. 18. Blanchot, ‘Story and Scandal,’ 190. 19. Ibid., 191. 20. While this chapter refers to the novel’s references to Reaganism as a way of articulating one mode of Ellis’s underwriting in the novel, it

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21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

NOTES

also fully adheres to Marco Abel’s astute understanding of the critical cost of viewing the novel simply “as a satire of the immoral materialist excesses of Reaganomics.” Abel, “Judgment is not an Exit,” 38. Approaching the novel through Deleuze’s concept of “symptomatology,” Abel addresses the problems of judgment in the critical reception of American Psycho. While I agree with Abel that to see the novel as simply a satire on Reagonomics is somewhat reductive, my interpretation constitutes a departure from Abel’s purely aesthetic reading of the book. I regard Ellis’s aesthetic practice of underwriting in terms of an example of what Rancière’s understands to be aesthetic practices: “forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community. Artistic practices are ways of ‘doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of invisibility.” See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13. It is through this new triad of violence that this chapter seeks to build on and add to the body of criticism that has linked Patrick Bateman’s consumerism with his serial killing. Previous studies on the link between serial killing and consumerism in the novel include James Annesley, Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel and Sonia Baelo-Allué, ‘Serial Murder, Serial Consumerism: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, miscellanea: a journal of English and American studies, vol. 26, 2002, 71−90. Žižek, Violence, 2. Ibid., 174. See Julian Murphet’s chapter, “The Politics of American Psycho” in American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 53−64. Murphet’s guide to American Psycho provides a comprehensive analysis of the book. It introduces many aspects of the novel to the Ellis reader, including some elements that are fundamental to Ellis’s act of underwriting such as reification and cultural critique. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 21. Joan Didion, “New York” in Sentimental Journeys (London: Flamingo, 1992), 255. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 258. Ibid., 260. Ibid. Didion citing an editorial at the time in News, 272. Didion, ‘New York’ in Sentimental Journeys, 276.

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34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. For an excellent study that interrogates the relationship between the serial killer and contemporary American culture see Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (London: Routledge, 1998). 37. Žižek, Violence, 87. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Murphet also points to the importance of the divide between uptown and downtown in the novel in his study guide to the book. Murphet reads Ellis’s sympathies as lying with the punk scene. I read the divide as highlighting in particular the denial of downtown art scene by mainstream culture in terms of the denial of AIDS and radical expression and the attacks that artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano came under during the Culture Wars from 1989 to 1991, rather than any specific allegiance to a punk aesthetic. For Murphet’s comments on the death of downtown in relation to Patrick’s urban gentrifying agenda see American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 59–64. 43. For a brilliant study of the culture wars, see Richard Bolton, Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992). 44. Carl Tighe has also commented on the importance of this speech. See Tighe’s chapter, “Sex, satire and sadism: Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho” in Writing and Responsibility, 111. 45. Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), xiii. 46. Murphet, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 53. 47. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xv. 48. Bolton (ed.), Culture Wars, 343. 49. Elizabeth Young, “The Beast in the Jungle, The Figure in the Carpet” in Shopping in Space, 113. 50. Murphet has commented extensively on Bateman’s sympathies for Republicans and Nazis, see American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 54– 55. 51. Žižek, Violence, 11. 52. It is worth acknowledging Althusser’s objection to the “fashionable theory of ‘reification’ ” that Martin Jay points out in his introduction to Honneth’s lectures. Jay cites Althusser’s footnote in For Marx in which Althusser criticizes the reduction that takes place in what Althusser regards as the “projection of the theory of alienation found in the early texts, particularly the 1844 Manuscripts, on to the theory of ‘fetishism’ in Capital.” “In the 1844 Manuscripts,” Althusser remarks,

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53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

NOTES

“the objectification of the human essence is claimed as the indispensable preliminary to the reappropriation of the human essence by man. Throughout the process of objectification, man only exists in the form of an objectivity in which he meets his own essence in the appearance of a non-human, essence. This objectification is not called ‘reification’ even though it is called inhuman. Inhumanity is not represented par excellence by the model of a ‘thing’ ”. Thus for Althusser “An ideology of reification that sees ‘things’ everywhere in human relations confuses in this category ‘thing’ (a category more foreign to Marx cannot be imagined) every social relation, conceived according to the model of a money-thing ideology.” See Martin Jay’s ‘Introduction’ to Reification: A New Look t an Old Idea, 12; Louis Althusser, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 230. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the State” (1969) in On Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 2. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, translated, edited, and Introduction by Harry Tucker Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971): 69−87. In this part of his study, Rank is drawing on Freud’s essay “Zur Einführung des Narzissmus,” 1914; [see Gesammelte Schriften (London, 1946), x, 137−70]. Rank, The Double, 82. Rank, The Double, 83. This is referred to by Žižek in Violence, 10, and also by Jacques Derrida in his essay “Specters of Marx” in Specters of Marx, The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, & the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, (London: Routledge, 1994). Andrew J. Webber, The Doppelganger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 6. Ibid. Webber argues “The Doppelganger can be said to submit the subject to power-play on the model of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Indeed, the Hegelian model of ‘Aufhebung’ or sublation might usefully be applied to its ambiguous agency, as its operations exalt, preserve, and annul the subject by turns.” See Webber, The Doppelganger, 5. Althusser, “Ideology and the State,” 49. Ibid., 2. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992), 164. See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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69. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Volume I: Inferno, translated by Mark Musa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 89. Here the translator adds a note explaining “of souls who lost the good of intellect: That is, those souls who have lost sight of the Summum Bonum, the ‘supreme Good,’ or God.” 70. Murphet, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 55. 71. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, translated by Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 20. 72. Ibid., 5. 73. Murphet also points this out, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 55. 74. Rancière, The Politics of Literature,, 102. 75. Murphet provides a detailed analysis of the three digressions into pop music in his guide and reads Ellis’s critique of the turn in music from 1970 to 1980 in terms of “punk’s death” and its succession by a “corporate aesthetic.” Murphet, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 33–34. 76. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, 51. 77. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiv. 78. Horkheimer and Adorno, “Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of Enlightenment,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 171. 79. Marcuse, ‘Preface’ to An Essay On Liberation, 9. 80. Glyn Daly and Slavoj Žižek, Conversations With Žižek, 100. 81. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 9. 82. Bewes, Reification, 9. 83. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man,8. 84. Ibid., 7. 85. Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 16, citing Theodor Adorno, “Zum Verhältnis,” 133. 86. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 11. 87. Marcuse, An Essay On Liberation, (Hammondsworth: Pelican, 1972), 15. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 20. 90. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 77. 91. Ibid., 78. 92. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 118. 93. Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), xiii. 94. Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structures, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1965), 2. 95. For a brilliant recent study on homosexuality in American Psycho, see Berthold Schoene, “Serial Masculinity: Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho” in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 54. no. 2 (2008), 378−97.

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204

NOTES

96. 97. 98. 99.

Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 103. Ibid., 104. Ibid. Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea For Ethical Violence” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 177. 100. Nancy J. Chodorow, “Hate, Humiliation and Masculinity,” in Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism, edited by Sverre Varvin and Vamik D. Volkan (London: The International Psychoanalytical Association, 2003), 102. 101. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 56. 102. Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2004), 172. 103. Ibid., 173. 104. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, (London: Verso, 1999), 159. 105. Ibid. 106. The scene in Bloomingdale’s is exemplary of Patrick attempting to seek reassurance via the commodity and the brand. The passage has been commented on widely by critics. For instance see Murphet, American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide, 36-37. 107. Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 125, n. 21. 108. Žižek has written extensively on the superegoic injunction to “Enjoy!” in late-capitalist society. See The Metastases of Enjoyment, 19−20. Žižek describes this as the superego paradox of the injunction: “Like it or not, enjoy yourself!” Commenting on this phenomenon, which he sees as typical of contemporary society, Žižek argues that Lacan emphasised frequently in his work that “the ultimate content of the superego injunction is ‘Enjoy!’ ” (POF, 114). The importance of this subliminal sanction is that it sustains enjoyment itself and thus undercuts any idea that enjoyment is an immediate spontaneous state. See Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 114. 109. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 81. 110. Ibid. 111. Roger Rosenblatt, “Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away With Murder?” New York Times, December 16, 1990. 112. Marcuse, An Essay On Liberation, 17. 113. Ibid., 17. 114. Ibid., 19. 115. Žižek, Violence, 12. 116. Ibid. 117. Althusser, “Ideology and the State” in On Ideology, 17. 118. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 171. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., xiv. 121. Žižek, Violence, 86.

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122. Murphet, American Psycho, 57. 123. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 32-33. 124. Roger Cohen, “Editorial Adjustments in American Psycho.” New York Times, February 18, 1991, A13. Cited by Eberly in Citizen Critics, 104. 125. Žižek, Violence, 174. 3

Cloning the Nineties: Cultural Amnesia, Terrorism, and Contemporary Iconoclasm in G L A MOR A M A

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Andrew Gibson, “Oublier Baudrillard,” 135. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 18. Ibid. Roger Luckhurst, “Traumaculture” in Remembering the 1990s, 28 Ibid. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 19. Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 97. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 200), 118. Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 6. This term is used by Andrew Goodwin in his study of MTV culture Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Goodwin explains in an introductory note: “The notion of ‘distraction’ is widely known through the cultural criticism of Walter Benjamin and has recently been taken up in the debate about postmodernity. My deployment of the term distraction factory is, however, taken from an essay by Siegfried Kracauer titled ‘The Mass Ornament,’ published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1927. This essay, an analysis of the ‘Tiller Girls,’ is reprinted in Bronner and Kellner (1989).” See Goodwin, p. 199 n. 1. Robert Miklitsch adds to this theory of distraction in his study From Hegel to Madonna: Towards A General Economy of ‘Commodity Fetishism’ (1998). He comments on the origins of Goodwin’s term “distraction factory,” stating that it “echoes W.F. Haug’s notion of the ‘distraction industry’ (which itself echoes Adorno and Horkheimer)” and comments that it neatly gathers issues concerning “MTV, dancing, popular culture, the distraction factory.” See Miklitsch, 13. Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, 271. E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture (London: Methuen Press, 1987), 145. For an illuminating analysis of indie music in the 1990s, see Joe Brooker, “Commercial Alternative” in, New Formations: Remembering the 1990s, no. 50, 2003, 106−23. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 250.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

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206

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15. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, 93. 16. Cited from the film by Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, written and directed by Guy Debord, based on his book by the same name (Simar Films, 1973). 17. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 34. 18. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, 93. 19. Barthes citing Blanchot in Camera Lucida, 106. 20. See Slavoj Žižek’s Introduction, “The Cartesian Body and Its Discontents,” in Miran Božovič, An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and the Body in Early Modern Philosophy (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000), viii. 21. See Shankar Vedantam’s essay, “When Violence Masquerades as Virtue: A Brief History of Terrorism,” in Violence or Dialogue?, 10. 22. See Jamie Clarke, “An Interview With Bret Easton Ellis.” http:// home.c2i.net/ajohanne/frames_jamieclark.htm. 23. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 39. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 40. 26. Michael Kohler, Constructed Realities: The Art of Staged Photography (Zürich: Edition Stemmle, 1995), 19. 27. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 117. 28. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1996), 85. 29. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10. 30. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in Walter Benjamin: 1935−1938 V. 3: Selected Writings (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103. 31. Žižek, Conversations With Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 87. 32. Luckhurst, “Traumaculture,” 28. 33. Žižek, Violence, 52. 34. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92. 35. Seltzer, Serial Killers, 270−71. 36. Ibid., 271. 37. Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 103. 38. Žižek, Violence, 52. 39. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Clive Scott, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion, 1999), 240. 43. Ibid. 44. Kristeva, Tales Of Love, 106. 45. Ibid. 46. Henrik Skov Nielsen also comments on this passage and literalminded reading specifically in terms of narrative, “Telling Doubles

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47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

207

and Literal-Minded Reading in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama,” in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, 22. Skov Nielsen argues that “the novel creates a new kind of narrative with protagonist and double struggling for mastery all the way down to the enunciation of the first person pronoun” (25). For an exhaustive analysis of “the motif of the double” in the novel, see Skov Nielsen, “Telling Doubles and Literal-Minded Reading in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama,” in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, 20−29. Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 18. Michel Guerrin, “An Image from Guy Bourdin is Never Serene” in Guy Bourdin, Exhibit A (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). No pagination. Peter Boxall, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (London: Routledge, 2006), 157. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 157. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, 103. Henrik Skov Nielsen, “Telling Doubles,” 23. Popular science fiction novels of the late nineties employed the spare motif, such as Michael Marshall Smith’s 1996 novel Spares (London: HarperCollins, 1996). Adam Roberts, Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2006), 60. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, 94. W.J.T. Mitchell, “Vital Signs/Cloning Terror” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, 92 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 10−11. Žižek, Violence, 38. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1973. Salman Akhtar, “Dehumanization: origins, manifestations, and remedies,” in Violence or Dialogue?, 139. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 142. Vedantam, “When Violence Masquerades as Virtue,” 10. Alex E. Blazer provides an excellent reading of Glamorama in terms of narcissism and abjection. Blazer argues that Glamorama and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club portray “the dark underside of contemporary narcissism, a primal anxiety that one’s self does not live up

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NOTES

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 4

to the doctrinal dream.” Blazer, “Glamorama, Fight Club, and the Terror of Narcissistic Abjection” in American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture, edited by Jay Prosser (London: Routledge, 2008), 178. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2. Ibid. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 113. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil, 93. Ibid., 97. “Frank Moore: A Man of Fancy and Facts,” Update, New York Academy of Sciences, April/May 2002. www.speronewestwater. com. Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin, The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2003), 155. Dorothy Nelkin, “The Gene as Cultural Icon,” Art Journal, Spring 1996, vol. 55, no. 1. Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 12. For an excellent discussion of narcissism in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, see Jeffrey Berman, ‘The Aesthetics of Narcissism in The Picture of Dorian Gray’ in Narcissism and the Novel (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 148−76. Žižek, Looking Awry, 126. Ibid. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 130. Ibid. Twenty-First- Century Gothic (or post- 9/11 Fatalism): Self-Parody, Reification, and the Becoming Real of Cultural and Authorial Fictions in L U NAR P AR K

1. The special issue of New Formations: Remembering the 1990s opened with Derrida’s question. New Formations: Remembering the 1990s, 50, Autumn 2003. 2. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Language and Culture After the Holocaust” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, (eds.) Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 315. 3. Ibid. 4. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (eds.) Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 281. 5. Adorno, “Meditations on Metaphysics” in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, 283. 6. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader (ed.) Rolf Tiedemann (California, Stanford University Press, 2003), 6: 355.

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7. Siri Hustvedt, “The World Trade Center,” in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, (ed.) Ulrich Baer (New York: New York University Press, September 11, 2002), 158. 8. Žižek, Violence, 4. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future,” in The Guardian, December 22, 2001. 12. Catherine Morley, “Writing In the Wake of 9/11,” in American Thought and Culture in the Twenty-First Century (eds.) Catherine Morley and Martin Halliwell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 246. 13. DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2008), 33. 14. Morley, “Writing in the Wake of 9/11,” 247. 15. Ibid., 248. 16. Alain-Philippe Durand, “Beyond the Extreme: Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows On The World” in Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, 109. Durand offers a brilliant critique of Frédéric Beigbeder’s novel and holocaust literature along with by far one of the more radical and illuminating accounts of postcultural trauma literature. 17. Martin Amis, “Fear and Loathing” in The Guardian, September 18, 2001. 18. Ian McEwan, “Beyond Belief” in The Guardian, September 12, 2001. 19. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee (eds.) Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 112. 20. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays (London: Verso, 2002), 13. 21. See “Praise for Lunar Park” at the outset of Lunar Park citing Christopher Cleave, “The bad boy’s sensitive side” in The Telegraph, October 5, 2005. 22. See “Praise for Lunar Park” at the outset of Lunar Park citing Edward Wyatt, “Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror” in The New York Times, August 7, 2005. 23. Žižek, Violence, 34. 24. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics edited and translated by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 195. 25. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 81. 26. Baudrillard speaking on the occasion of the Siemens Media Prize of 1995, cited by Chris Turner in his Introduction to The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, 9. 27. Adorno, “Meditations on Metaphysics”, 284. 28. Žižek, Violence, 29.

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210 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

NOTES

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 30. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 364. Here Žižek is citing Alain Badiou’s lecture “The Caesura of Nihilism” given at the University of Essex, September 10, 2003. Ibid., 360. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 360, referring to Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (London: Sage Publications, 1992). Žižek, Living in the End Times, 360−61. Neil Smith, “After the American Lebensraum: ‘Empire,’ Empire and Globalization,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003, 260. Žižek, Violence, 34. Ibid., 34−35. Ibid., 35. Žižek, Violence, 35. John Tirman, “Immigration and Insecurity: Post-9/11 Fear in the United States” published on July 28, 2006 http://borderbattles.ssrc. org/Tirman/. The essay is reprinted with permission from the MIT Center for International Studies’s Audit of Conventional Wisdom, 06−09 (June 2006). Tirman, unpaginated. Luckhurst, “Traumaculture” in New Formations: Remembering the 1990s, no. 50, 2002, 29. Here Luckhurst is referring to “posttraumatic stress disorder,” DSM-IV, Washington, DC, American Psychiatric Association, 1994, 424. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 217. Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 98. Ibid., 98. Ibid. Hartman, “Language and Culture After the Holocaust,” 315. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin De Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 29. Ibid., 34. Oxford English Dictionary vol. xviii (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1989), 994. Adorno, “Meditations on Metaphysics,” ’ 284. Amis, “Fear and Loathing,” unpaginated. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text,” 113. Adorno, “Meditations on Metaphysics,” 283. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 193. Hartman, “Language and Culture After the Holocaust,” 314.

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58. Morley, “Writing in the Wake of 9/11,” 248. 59. Hartman, “Language and Culture After the Holocaust,” 314. 60. Mick Taussig, “Terror As Usual: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of History as a State of Siege,” in Social Text 23 (Fall/Winter 1989), 3−20. 61. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, 45. 62. Ibid. 63. DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future.” Unpaginated. 64. Timothy Bewes, Reification or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002), xi. 65. Ibid., 8. 66. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 71. 67. Ibid., 80. 68. Ibid., 81. 69. Roger Rosenblatt, “Snuff this Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?’, New York Times, December 16, 1990. 70. Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15. 71. Baudrillard, Screened Out (London: Verso, 2002), 201. 72. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 113. 73. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 97. 74. Ibid., 104. 75. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 193. 76. Ibid. 77. Maurice Blanchot, The Book To Come, , 204. 78. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, 32−3. 79. Ibid., 33. Coda: The Politics of Exposure: Unsafe Lines and Narratives of Conflict in I MPER I A L B EDROOMS 1. Noam Chomsky, “Terror and Just Response” in Terrorism and International Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 75. 2. Neil Smith, “After the American Lebensraum: ‘Empire,’ Empire and Globalization’ in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003, 249. 3. Leo Panitch, “September 11 and the American Empire,” in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2003, 235. 4. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. 5. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002), 34. 6. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006), 53. 7. Neil Smith, “Prologue” in American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xi.

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8. Edwin Schur, “Sexual Coercion in American Life,” in Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (eds.) Laura L. Toole, Jessica R Schiffman, and Margie L. Kiter Edwards (New York and London: New York University Press), 87. 9. Ibid., 88. 10. Ibid., 89. 11. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: Women’s Press, 1980). 12. Schur, “Sexual Coercion in American Life,” 91. 13. Ibid., 90. 14. Žižek, Violence, 123. 15. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 172. 16. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 243. 17. Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Diana B. Henriques, “A Nation at War: The Contractor; Company Has Ties in Washington, and to Iraq,’ ” in New York Times, April 18, 2003, http://www.nytimes. com/2003/04/18/business/a- nation- at- war- the- contractorcompany-has-ties-in-washington-and-to-iraq.html. 18. Ibid. 19. “Blood and Oil: How the West Will Profit from Iraq’s Most Precious Commodity,” in The Independent, January 7, 2007. 20. Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti, and Robert F. Worth, “Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents,” in New York Times, August 14, 2010. 21. Žižek, Living in the End Times, 174. 22. Ibid., 323. 23. Rancière, The Politics of Literature, 30. 24. Ibid.

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Page numbers in bold refer to main discussions of the central texts and concepts. 1941 [Steven Spielberg, 1979] 154 8MM [Joel Schumacher, 1999] 123–4 9/11 18, 19, 21, 26, 66, 113, 116, 117, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 146, 147, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 159, 162, 170 Abel, Marco 17, 24, 62 abjection 19, 120, 121 absence 33, 35, 38, 41, 43, 44, 52, 56, 57, 96, 99, 106 see also alienation Acker, Kathy 60 Adorno, Theodor 1, 10, 13–14, 25, 26, 27, 35–6, 40, 43, 69, 79, 80–1, 131–2, 141, 151, 153, 181, 189 n.2, 191 n.33, 194 n.7, 205 n.10 see also Dialectic of Enlightenment; Frankfurt School aesthetics 3, 10, 17, 30, 35, 43, 53, 62, 99, 125, 132, 162, 176, 199–200 n.20 AIDS 68, 70–1, 94, 125, 201 n.42 Akhtar, Salman 118, 119 alienation 14, 25, 32, 35, 39–40, 42, 43, 44–5, 47, 49, 55–6, 81, 147, 160, 201 n.52 see also absence Alighieri, Dante 76, 77, 203 n.69 Allende, Salvador 31 Althusser, Louis 36, 72, 76, 89, 196 n.54, 201–2 n.52

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American Psycho 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19–20, 21, 24, 40, 59–94, 95, 135, 137, 138, 159, 160, 191 n.33, 200 n.20 Amis, Martin 134, 152, 157 amnesia 20, 26, 34, 96, 106, 115, 127 see also memory; recovered memory therapy Anker, Susan 126 Annesley, James 12, 16, 23–4, 200 n.21 Arendt, Hannah 171, 199 n.7 Armageddon [Michael Bay, 1998] 157 assimilation 6, 9, 10–12, 18, 67, 69, 94, 117, 120 Auster, Paul 7 authenticity 21, 103, 119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 168, 170, 171 Badiou, Alain 29, 141, 142 Bakhtin, Mikhail 13, 34, 134, 135, 137, 150, 152, 153, 161 Balibar, Etienne 89, 91 Barthes, Roland 97, 101–3, 106, 121, 124 Basquiat, Jean Michael 125 Batman [Tim Burton, 1989] 66 Baudrillard, Jean 21, 24, 97, 99, 102, 111, 116, 117, 123, 125, 135, 139, 158, 159, 160, 163, 170 Baxter, Tara 11 Bechtel 181, 182 Beck, Ulrich 143

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Beck [musician] 98 Beigbeder, Frédéric 16 Windows on The World 133–4 Bell, Daniel 68 Benjamin, Walter 2–4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 103, 113, 114, 124, 187 Berlin, Irving 49 Bewes, Timothy 14–15, 51, 61, 81, 158 Blair, Tony 125 Blanchot, Maurice 61–2, 99, 131, 153, 162–3 blank aesthetic 16, 19, 24, 29, 32–3, 35, 36, 39, 54, 56, 57 blank fiction 16, 29 blank generation 16, 17 Blazer, Alex E. 19, 207–8 n.67 body 20, 87, 88, 96, 97, 100, 102–5, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 128, 129, 173, 179, 180, 181 see also mutilation body commerce 20, 97 border relations in Imperial Bedrooms 174, 175, 176, 177, 181, 183 U.S. 21, 166, 167 Bourdieu, Pierre 28, 31 Bourdin, Guy Exhibit A 111 bourgeois Brecht’s critique of 78 Ellis’s critique of 21, 31, 61, 66, 67, 71 Hugo’s critique of 77 Lukács critique of 190 n.19 writer 9, 12 Bowman Isaiah 166 Boxall, Peter 113 Brat Pack 16, 19, 23, 24 Brazil [Terry Gillian, 1985] 129 Brecht, Bertolt 9, 77 The Threepenny Opera 59, 78 Bruce, Tammy 11, 12 Burdon, Eric 30 Burroughs, William Naked Lunch 11, 60 Burton, Richard 29

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Bush, George [U.S. President 1989– 93] 51, 76, 135, 154, 157 Bush, George Jr [U.S. President 2001–9] 113, 157 Bush administration, second 137, 166, 167, 173, 181 bystander syndrome 50, 53–6 cannibalism 86, 88, 198 n.97 capitalism 1, 9, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 24, 28, 45, 46, 47, 62, 63, 66, 68, 72–4, 76, 80, 82–4, 91, 104, 108, 113, 166, 176 Capote, Truman 31 Caveney, Graham 11, 16, 23, 24 celebrity culture 23, 100, 102, 104, 113, 118, 119, 124, 135 see also fame censorship 6, 21, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 162, 163, 177 Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote 83 Cheney, Dick 149 Chodorow, Nancy F. 85 Chomsky, Noam 117, 166 Churchill, Winston 141, 142 Clarke, Jamie 100 Cleave, Christopher 136 Clemente, Francesco 125 Clinton, Bill 125, 154 cloning 20, 95–7, 108, 112, 114, 115, 116, 124, 125, 126, 127 CNN 141, 143, 176, 182 coercion 18, 173, 184, 186 Cohen, Roger 94 collective hallucination 98, 99, 101, 103, 106, 121 colonial rhetoric 175 see also imperialism; neoimperialism commodity fetishism 9, 34, 59, 63, 64, 65, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86–9, 95, 96–7, 105, 160 conflict 22, 161, 165, 168–9, 180, 187 Connor, Stephen 6 contemporary, the 1, 2, 4, 5–6, 10, 14, 15, 18, 61, 63, 66, 81, 131, 142, 143, 144, 160, 187, 188

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INDEX

controversy 1, 11, 61, 63, 89, 138 Cooper, Dennis 60 cosmetic surgery 180, 181, 184 see also reconstruction practices Costello, Elvis 34, 45, 46, 47, 77, 165, 166 counternarrative 5, 132, 133 compare underwriting Coupland, Douglas Girlfriend in a Coma 61 Craft, Nikki 11 culture industry 10, 80, 191 n.33, 205 n.10 see also Frankfurt School; repressive desublimation culture wars (1989–91) 67 cyberspace 177–8 death 25, 43, 52, 55, 75, 97, 102, 103, 104, 111, 122, 123, 124, 128, 162, 171, 172, 176, 182 death-in-life 25, 52, 55, 56 see also melancholy Debord, Guy 9, 20, 95–6, 99–100, 112, 113 dehumanization 88, 104, 118–19, 122, 126 see also death; depersonalization Delbanco, Andrew 26, 27 DeLillo, Don Falling Man 132–3, 158 ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ 5, 113, 132 depersonalization 6, 7, 36, 80, 86, 96 see also dehumanization Derrida, Jacques 131 desire 56, 57, 83–5, 123, 140, 146, 160, 163, 176, 183, 184 détournement 77 Dialectic of Enlightenment 40, 69, 79, 80, 91–2, 181 see also Frankfurt School dialogism 12, 13, 37, 73, 109, 135, 136, 158, 169 Didion, Joan 32–3, 38, 64, 65, 66 Dinkins, David 65, 66, 71 dismemberment 105 see also mutilation

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DNA 20, 116, 125, 126 Doheny, Edward. L. 173 Dolly (genetically cloned sheep) 116 doppelganger 21, 74–5, 108, 109, 136, 137, 150, 157, 202 n.64 see also cloning; doubling Dostoevsky, Fyodor Demons 9 The Double 150, 161, 179 Notes From Underground 8, 13 double 52, 73–4, 109, 115, 116, 133, 150, 152, 154, 161, 207 n.47 see also doppelganger double-voicing 1, 4, 10, 12–14, 18, 24, 67, 71–2, 77, 83, 96, 108–13, 117, 121, 129, 135, 149, 161, 176, 184 doubling 52, 61, 73, 108–9, 127, 154, 159 see also cloning Downing, Lisa 55 duplicity, authorial 2, 7, 14, 22, 60, 187 Durand, Alain-Philippe 16, 133, 134 Dürer, Albrecht, Melancholia I 56 Dylan, Bob 30 Eaglestone, Robert 30 East Village, New York 67, 70 Eberly, Rosa. A. 11, 60, 64 Eggers, David 9 elitism 28, 48, 50, 60, 64, 70, 85, 91, 175, 177, 179 Ellis, Bret Easton see individual titles embellishment, authorial 138, 169 Empire of the Sun [Stephen Spielberg, 1987] 129 ethical illusion 117 ethics 7, 12, 17, 29, 33, 60, 68, 74, 117, 120, 125, 133, 134, 135, 169, 187 existentialism 27 exploitation 18, 21, 72, 82, 88, 166, 168, 170–3, 175, 177, 179, 181–2 exposure 5, 22, 165, 170, 173–7, 187 compare latency

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False Memory Syndrome Foundation 127 fame 171–4 see also celebrity culture Fante, John Ask the Dust 8 fascism 2, 80, 92 Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying 31 fear 6, 13, 18, 21, 25, 34, 41, 42, 44, 47, 77, 85, 87, 109, 115, 132, 133, 139–48, passim 149–63, 176, 179, 189 n.9 Firestone, Shulamith 175 first-person narration 1, 6, 7, 8, 14, 16, 35–6, 39, 51, 55, 96, 106, 108, 111, 112, 135, 137, 169, 170 Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 29 foreign policy, American 68, 117, 149 see also imperialism; neoimperialism Foster Wallace, David 9 Frankfurt School 10, 13, 18, 40, 60, 79, 80, 91, 92, 113, 181, 205 n.10 see also Adorno, Theodor; Dialectic of Enlightenment; Horkheimer, Max Freccero, Carla 17, 24 Freud, Sigmund 27, 57, 73, 87, 202 n.58 Fukuyama, Francis 66 gapped subject 20, 96, 103, 108, 113, 115, 118, 126–7 gaze 42, 46, 56–7, 104, 105, 121 Generation X 24 genetic engineering 125–6 see also cloning; DNA Genovese, Kitty [Catherine] 54, 55 Gibson, Andrew 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 56, 95 Girard, René 83 Glamorama 1, 6, 10, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 40, 81, 95–129, 135, 151, 156, 160, 207–8 n.46 globalization 7, 15, 16, 66, 113, 166, 187 Goodwin, Andrew 205 n.10

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gothic 21, 131, 136–7, 150, 158–9 see also horror Gramsci, Antonio 46 Guantanamo Bay [detention camp] 113 Guerrin, Michael 111 Gulf War [1990–1 also Persian Gulf War] 94, 157, 170 Gulf War [2003–9 also Second Persian Gulf War/Iraq War) 117, 141, 149, 165, 166, 173 Guthrie, Woody 49 Halliburton 181, 182 Hartman, Geoffrey 131, 150, 154–5 Harvey, David 28, 30, 46, 154, 155, 167 Hegel G.W.F. 15, 44, 103, 202 n.64 Hemingway, Ernest The Sun Also Rises 13, 31 Hendrix, Jimi 30 HIV 70 see also AIDS Hollinger, Veronica 52 Honneth, Axel 14, 34, 192 n.55, n.56 Horkheimer, Max 25, 40, 69, 79, 80, 91, 92, 181, 205 n.10 see also Dialectic of Enlightenment; Frankfurt School horror 93, 115, 122, 123, 124, 138, 140, 149, 150, 155, 157, 158, 162 see also gothic Hugo, Victor 9 Les Misérables 77, 79 Human Genome Project 20, 125, 126 humor 7 Hurley, Kelly 150 Hustvedt, Siri 132 Huttenbach, Henry. R. 54 Huxley, Aldous 35 iconoclasm 20, 95, 99, 113, 116, 118 iconography 20, 34, 59, 64, 99, 102, 107, 117, 126, 182

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INDEX

ideology 18, 20, 63, 65, 66, 69, 71, 72, 76, 94, 96, 104, 148, 196 n.54 illusion 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 102, 112, 117, 119, 124, 145 image 1, 20, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 45, 73, 95, 96, 97, 99–129, 172 see also image fetishism; photograph image culture 99–129, 172 image fetishism 20, 30, passim 96–7, 100, 103, 105, 116, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126 immigration 147, 176 see also border relations, U.S. Imperial Bedrooms 21–2, 52, 165–87, 191 n.33 imperialism 49, 50, 171 see also neoimperialism Informers, The 6, 8, 19, 23, 24, 25, 31, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 48, 50, 52–7, 172, 191 n.33 interpellation 36–7, 196 n.54 Invasion of the Body Snatchers [Don Siegel 1956/Philip Kaufman 1978] 115 Jakobson, Roman 36–7 Jameson, Fredric 27, 33, 34, 35 Janowitz, Tama 7, 23 Jaspers, Karl 35 Jay, Martin 14, 41, 190 n.19, 201 n.52 Kaplan, E. Ann. 97, 98 Kennedy, John F. 29, 30, 142 Kierkegaard, Søren 43 King, Stephen 150 Kohler, Michael 100 Kristeva, Julia 19, 42, 107, 121 Lacan, Jacques 10, 19, 40, 81, 99, 128, 204 n.108 latency 22, 173, 174, 175 compare exposure Lepenies, Wolf 43

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Les Misérables (the musical) 77, 78, 79 Less Than Zero 6, 13, 19, 21, 23–56, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 172, 182, 184, 185, 186, 191 n.33 Lili Marleen (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1981) 129 Luckhurst, Roger 20, 30, 96, 103, 126, 149, 150 Lukács, Georg 34, 190 n.19 Lunar Park 1, 6, 8, 9, 12, 18, 19, 21–4, 26, 120, 131–63, 168, 170, 191 n.30, 194 n.3 Mailer, Norman 8, 11, 61, 190 n.26, 199 n.7 Malabou, Catherine 56 Mallarmé, Stéphane 29 Mandel, Naomi 7–8, 16, 17, 24, 60, 62 Marcuse, Herbert 10, 11, 13–14, 20, 63–4, 80–3, 87, 89, 98, 99, 108, 160 see also Frankfurt School Marks, Peter 6 Marx, Karl 15, 32, 63, 64, 66, 74, 171, 181, 202 n.52 Marxism 9, 12, 14, 64, 78, 82, 84, 87, 94, 158, 160 see also commodity fetishism master-slave dialectic 15, 66, 75, 90–1, 121, 177 Maublanc, René 9 McEwan, Ian 134, 157 McInerney, Jay 7, 23 The Good Life 132–3 media, American 2, 11, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 60, 64, 70, 71, 72, 97, 99, 102, 105, 107, 135, 136, 137, 141, 142, 143, 147, 149, 155, 158 melancholy 19, 25, 27–9, passim 32–9, 43, 52, 53, 54–7 memory 34, 56, 96, 106, 108, 126, 127, 155, 156, 192 n.55 see also amnesia; recovered memory therapy

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military-industrial complex 167 Miller, Henry Tropic of Cancer 11 mirrors 21, 37, 42–5, 53, 54, 74, 76, 87, 96, 119, 127, 128, 159, 171 mise-en-abyme 72, 74, 147 modern warfare 178 modernism 31 monologue see first-person narration Moore, Frank 125, 126 Morgiève, Richard 16 Morley, Catherine 19, 132, 133, 154 MTV 97, 98, 101, 102, 107, 123, 205 n.10 Murphet, Julian 14, 22, 25, 32, 33, 34, 48, 54, 63, 69, 77, 93 mutilation 10, 13, 59, 85, 86–8, 105 narcissism 19, 39, 41–3, 47, 52, 73, 88, 96, 105, 107, 109, 121, 127 necrophilia 55, 56, 198 n.97 Nelkin, Dorothy 126 neoimperialism 21, 48, 166, 171–6, 182–4 neoliberalism 5, 19, 21, 25, 27–8, 29, 31, 46–7, 51–3, 166 Neruda, Jan 31 Neruda, Pablo [Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto] 30 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 8, 16, 17, 24, 115, 206 n.46, 207 n.47 O’Brien, Tim Going After Cacciato 26 Obama, Barack 187 obscenity 11, 88–9 Olalquiaga, Celeste 97 one-dimensionality 13, 14, 80, 84, 87, 95, 97, 107, 108, 116 Onica, David 67 Osborne, Peter 6 Palahniuk, Chuck 7 Panitch, Leo 167 parody 6, 10, 12, 21, 98, 106, 114, 131, 135, 137–8, 159, 161, 170

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Pearl Harbor [attack on, 1941] 154 phatic code 36–9, 47, 54, 154, 167 phenomenology 15, 106, 108, 158 photograph 101–3, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111, 114, 122, 124, 127, 174 see also image photography 99, 104, 107, 119, 121 Plant, Sadie 77 political correctness 3–4, 18, 62, 63, 91, 132, 144, 187, 189 n.9 politics of literature 2–4, 10, 16, 64, 77–8, 187–8 postmodernism 2, 5, 6, 16, 22, 24, 27–8, 30, 95 post-political bio-politics 20, 144, 148 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 30, 149 privatization 19, 28, 46, 54, 175, 177, 182 psychoanalytic phobic object 85, 87, 160 racism 18, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 71, 74, 85, 90, 91, 92–3, 94, 134 see also violence, ideological Rancière, Jacques 4, 15–16, 77, 78, 187, 188 Rank, Otto 73 Reagan, Nancy 69 Reagan, Ronald 28, 31, 46, 47, 48, 68, 70, 76, 77, 82, 166, 181, 199 n.20 Reagan administration 70, 166 Real World, The [MTV] 101, 123 realism 7, 112, 123, 134–5, 138, 168 reality 10, 14, 33, 43, 61, 63, 73, 94, 95, 98–102, 106, 107, 111, 112, 119, 123, 125, 127, 128, 129, 134, 138, 141, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 172 reconstruction practices 21, 165, 180–1, 182, 184, 186 recovered memory therapy [RMT] 126, 127

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INDEX

Redacted [Brian de Palma, 2007] 187 reflection 1, 39, 42–5, 73, 107, 158, 171, 194 n.7 see also mirrors narrative as reflection 1, 62 self-reflection 34, 39, 96, 107, 108, 158 reification 12, 14–15, 23, 25, 34, 40, 43–4, 51, 76, 81, 84, 88–9, 95, 120, 131, 134–5, 139, 156, 158, 161, 187, 190 n.19, 192 n.55, n.56 repressive desublimation 10, 18, 20, 31, 40, 43, 63, 76, 78–9, 81–2, 89, 96, 98, 117, 127, 158, 191 n.35 see also culture industry; Frankfurt School Republicanism 20, 46, 51, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 76, 92, 94, 149, 167 Roberts, Adam 115 Rogers, Robert 109 Roosevelt, Theodore 166, 171, 175, 177 Rosenblatt, Roger 11, 89, 159 Rosenthal, Laurie Sue 65 Rules of Attraction, The 19, 23, 25–6, 29, 31, 33, 35, 38–40, 48, 170 Sahlin, Nicki 27 satire 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 20, 22, 62, 63, 82, 85, 115, 137, 199–200 n.20 scandal 61–2 Schoenberg, Arnold 18 Schoene, Berthold 19, 24 Schur, Edwin 173, 175, 178 Schwartz-Salant, Nathan 52 Scott, Clive 106, 107, 201 n.36 Selby Jnr., Hubert 7, 8 Seltzer, Mark 97, 104 sex trafficking 176 sexism 51, 71, 85, 90, 92 Shelly, Mary 149 Sheppard R. Z. 89 Sherman, Cindy 67 situationism 20, 77, 97, 113, 124

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Smith, Neil 143, 166, 171 snuff movies 123, 124, 159, 168, 172, 185 Sontag, Susan 127 spares 115, 126, 207 n.55 see also cloning spectacle 6, 20, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 112, 113, 114, 116, 120, 121, 123, 133 Stiles, Todd 60 Strange Days [Kathryn Bigelow, 1995] 123 subjectivity 18, 25, 26, 33, 35, 39, 43, 47, 56–9, 76, 81, 86, 91, 103, 104, 106, 126–7, 129, 136, 143, 145–6, 150, 151 suburbia 140, 143, 145–6, 151 Sum of All Fears, The [Alden Robinson, 2002] 157 surveillance culture 116, 123, 177 symbolic ideological deadlock 20, 81 tableau vivant 111 Taussig, Mick 156 technique, literary 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 165 terrorism 19, 20, 95, 96, 100, 101, 113–16, 117, 118, 119, 125, 126, 129, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 149, 151, 156, 158, 159, 162, 163 Tesis [Alejandro Amenábar, 1996] 123 Thatcher, Margaret 28 Thurschwell, Pamela 34, 45 time 6, 7, 135, 139 Tirman, John 147 Tocqueville, Alexis de 26 torture 19, 85, 100, 113, 114, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 168, 176, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186 trauma 6, 20, 21, 25, 30, 52, 55, 56, 96, 103–4, 106, 126–7, 134, 137–8, 141, 149–53, 155, 156, 157, 179, 209 n.16

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Tretiakov, Sergei 15 Twin Towers 116, 118, 157 see also World Trade Center underwriting 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 12–13, 15–22, 28, 35, 59, 62, 67, 90, 96, 154, 165, 166, 187–8 United 93 [Paul Greengrass, 2006] 134 unreliable narrator see first-person narration vampires 51–2, 172, 179, 198 n.97 Vedantam, Shankar 100, 119 Vietnam War 19, 26, 27, 28, 30, 48, 54, 115 violence 7, 8, 25, 31, 56, 63, 68, 88, 116, 140, 141, 142, 162, 166, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185, 186 as critique 17, 60 gender 173 ideological 18, 47, 49–51, 93, 94, 178 narrative 169, 171 objective 17, 22, 114, 172, 180 socio-symbolic 20, 54, 78 subjective 17, 18, 20, 63, 66, 69, 72, 90, 94, 114, 141, 171 symbolic 17, 96, 105–6 of symbolization 103, 104

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systemic 20, 25, 35, 55, 59, 62–4, 69, 89, 90, 94, 173 ultra-objective 89, 91 verbal 18 Žižek’s triumvirate of 17–19 voix acousmatique 128–9 voluntary servitude 81, 160 Warhol, Andy 97, 125 Webber, Andrew J. 74 Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray 127 Williams, Tennessee 31 Wolfreys, Julian 159 Wolin, Richard 3, 6 World Trade Center 116, 140, 141, 155, 157 see also Twin Towers Wyatt, Edward 136 Young, Elizabeth 5, 7, 11, 16, 17, 23, 24, 60, 69, 72, 192 n.42 Yvon, Josée 16 Žižek, Slavoj 3, 4, 10, 13, 17–19, 20, 25, 34–7, 39, 40, 43, 44, 47, 49–52, 55, 56, 63, 66–9, 81–3, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94, 96, 99, 100, 103, 105, 108, 113, 114, 117–18, 123, 128–9, 132, 136, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 181, 187, 189 n.9, 191 n.35, 204 n.108

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