From: A. Kroker [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 25 September 2002 20:22
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Article 112 - Cultural Pessimism
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 25, NO 3
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
Article 112 25/09/02 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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Cultural Pessimism and Rock Criticism:
Bret Easton Ellis' Writing (as) Hell
====================================================================
~Mike Grimshaw~
"History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things
are getting bad."
~American Psycho~
Toward the end of last century, in a ~fin de siecle~ yet to be fully
registered, catalogued and analysed, cultural pessimism ran as a
discordant counter note to a carnivalistic postmodernity. Yet
leading the charge was a novelist who himself seemed to embody the
success mantras of late twentieth century celebrity. Young, white,
privileged, privately educated, a pop culture and media darling in
his early twenties, running as part of a brat pack that helped
restore the novel as hip, sexually ambivalent, diving nose first
into drug culture Brett Easton Ellis seemed to embody all that was
deemed as 'the next big thing'. He came across as Media savvy,
aloof, disdainful, troubled yet excessive, his pen on the pulse of
postmodern urban youth, a cultural critic and brand name
junkie-whore who sought to transcribe transgressive thrills for
readers either looking to re-read their own lives or experience a
hyper-real ~frisson~ . It was sex and drugs and rock 'n'
roll...perhaps. Because in their curious blend of pop culture
sensibility and raging moral outrage, the novels of Bret Easton
Ellis are in many ways most reminiscent of the elitist societal
criticism of Jose Ortega Y Gasset's _The Revolt of The Masses_
(1932). For in 'the heart of darkness' of Ellis' vision, are to be
found the echoes of the Spanish's philosopher's elitist disdain for
mass existence and the mass man. According to Rockwell Gray, Ortega
Y Gasset's text, written from a sense of "almost visceral
discomfort" is "a cry of distress and doubt."[1] Likewise Ellis'
novels are tales lamenting the triumph of mass man, those who, as
Ortega states set 'no value on themselves', who 'feel like everybody
else' -- yet 'are not concerned'. Ellis writes as one who is deeply
concerned with the rise of 'mass man', a paradoxical critic of
contemporary society who yet appears to give society a vision of
itself that it desires. His 'anti-novel' novels, with their
disinterested, disaffected multiple voices and lack of narrative
structure echo Ortega Y Gasset's critique that with the rise of the
masses "there are no longer protagonists; there are only chorus."
This ~fin de siecle~ chorus is late Twentieth Century commodity
culture singing a bittersweet siren love song to itself. For Ellis'
novels are crammed full of lists, references and commodities that
explicitly perpetuate the cultural ennui of late Twentieth Century
consumption. The point made by Bataille that the object of desire is
"the mirror in which we ourselves are reflected"[2] is repeated time
and time again in the ethic of Ellis. We desire that which we
consume -- and which in turn consumes us -- because in it we see
ourselves in both actual presence and potential actuality. Yet this
act of consumption masks a deadly reality, for the violence of
consumption is indicative of the violence with which we interact.
Consumption is communication according to Bataille; that which
breaks through the separation and limits of contemporary
existence.[3] This act of consumption as communicative violence
reaches its apogee in _American Psycho_. Patrick Bateman's obsessive
chronicling of his and everyone else's consumption is indicative of
a limited existence that can only be overcome by acts of psychotic,
diabolic violence that seek to reduce victims to the level of
dehumanised commodities for (at one point, literal) consumption. Yet
Ellis, for all his ability to act as cultural chronicler, acts
primarily as dissenting voice: as the voice of Agape as opposed to
Eros; as the call to fraternity away from self-love; as the one who
acts as moralist in times of immorality. For as Ortega noted, the
mass-man aspires "...to live without conforming to a moral code...
Immoralism has become a common place, and anybody and everybody
boasts of practising it."[4]
It is in the face of such 'immoralism' that Ellis writes, locating
himself not as a detached observer but as a willing participant
seeking a redemptive transgression where only an act of
participation will free the self from terminal decline. On one level
he and his characters are attempting to act heroically in the face
of late twentieth century modern life. Stjepan Mestrovic has
reminded us it was at the previous ~fin de siecle~ that a radically
new conception of heroism emerged: that of the ordinary person
surviving the ordinary life beneath the burden of civilisation and
enlightenment. That is, to endure modernity is act heroically.[5]
The reference is to Baudelaire's _The Painter of Modern Life_ (1863)
which is often credited as writing the template for modern
existence. In his essay Baudelaire noted the opposition of 'nature'
to the claims of philosophy and religion for "...no sooner do we
take leave of the domain of needs and necessities to enter that of
pleasures and luxury than we see that nature can counsel nothing but
crime."[6]
Ellis' characters, existing in the midst of excessive luxury, can
find no recourse for existence except crime and deviance. This is
expressed in acts against others and against themselves as
'immoralists' desperately seeking a form of Nietzschean happiness,
freed from the morality of 'good and evil'. So in a sense Ellis'
characters act as Nietzschean anti-saints, enduring life not to
engender self-contempt in the reader but rather to inspire virtue in
the face of such transgression. They are, as Nietzsche noted of
saints, brutal[7]. But Ellis inverts this Nietzschean brutality into
a form of Bataillean 'funhouse mirror' in which we recognize
ourselves as distorted; seeking the true reflection as relief and
confirmation of the truthfulness of ourselves.
Therefore Ellis provides what Ortega Y Gasset in _Man and Crisis_
calls 'crisis man', living "a ~vita minima~ -- a life emptied of
itself, incompetent, unstable." Crisis Man acts in two main ways --
with 'sceptical frigidity, anguish, desperation' or with "a sense of
fury, madness, [and] an appetite for vengeance because of the
emptiness of his life."[8]
These options operate as the characters in Ellis' novels. For the
main part his characters act within the first response: the
disaffected Clay of _Less Than Zero_, the confused Paul and Lauren
of _The Rules of Attraction_, the 'lost' Victor of _Glamorama_ .
Yet, always there, acting as counterpoint are those characters whose
response is not passivity but violence, vengeance and anger. Those
who, as Ortega Y Gasset notes, respond to the emptiness of their
life with a "drive to enjoy brutally, cynically, whatever comes his
way -- flesh, luxury, power."[9] Here exist the valley kids of _Less
Than Zero_, the Bateman brothers of _The Rules of Attraction_ and
_American Psycho_, Alison Poole, and Bobby Hughes of _Glamorama_ .
In between are the characters of _The Informers_, the faceless
responses of a society torn both ways.
The fiction of Bret Easton Ellis needs to be approached from two
angles: through a consideration of his writings and through what he
has divulged in a series of interviews. For Ellis is an elusive
writer -- a blank scribe who requires the contentions of his
interviews to allow a re-evaluation past the common hysteria and
media trials that have been elicited by his work. It is my
contention that Ellis has been writing the same novel in various
forms because he is a 'one-trick' writer, a moralist rather than a
novelist, a didactic chorus of complaint who links aphorisms with
blank text, who seeks to make a point rather than tell a story. As
he has commented on his ~oeuvre~ : "The concerns are the same, the
themes are the same, the tonality of the writing is the same."[10]
In this manner Ellis also embodies an apposite Spenglerian task,
that of the 'thinker' as outlined in one of the core texts of
Twentieth Century cultural pessimism _The Decline of the West_:
A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolise time
according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he
thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the
picture of the world which was born at this birth. It is that
which he does not invent but rather discovers within himself.
It is himself over again; his being expressed in words; the
meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far
as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life
are identical.[11]
As such a 'thinker' Ellis is also writing in a Spenglerian "Winter",
that phase of civilisation defined as "Dawn of megalopolitan
Civilisation. Extinction of spiritual creative force. Life itself
becomes problematical, Ethical-practical tendencies of an
irreligious and unmetaphysical cosmopolitanism."[12] This vision of
decline does however deviate significantly from Ellis' outlook. For
Spengler such decline is a natural part of any civilization, a
lethargic ennui that can be merely noted and mourned, never
overcome. For Ellis such decline is unnatural and must be challenged
on every possible occasion. It is this attitude that reforms his
initial cultural pessimism into the satiric diatribe of the outraged
moralist. Dick Hebidge may have famously stated that "postmodernity
is modernity without the hopes and dreams which made modernity
bearable"[13]; Ellis refuses to give up the hopes and dreams. He
writes novels of personal and public horror that seek to expose the
transgression of postmodern culture against the soul of both the
individual and society. His novels are carnivals of horror. Yet in
doing so he subverts the postmodern use of horror as carnivalistic
and source of transcendence through the body.[14] Yes bodies are
abused, bought, sold, discarded, killed and consumed. Yet such
vampiric, werewolfish metamorphosis of bodily identity is not an
affirmation of transgression as liberative nor of smashing taboos as
freedom. For Ellis such carnivalistic excess is horrible. The
society that turns life into a freakshow, a society that celebrates
transgression of self and traditional codes is a society that denies
humanity in the name of spectacle.
Ellis has described his books as "...patch-braided satires of the
culture I live in, pin-pointing the things that disgust me and make
me angry and cause me a lot of anxiety and ridiculing
them..."(sic).[15] It appears that what makes Ellis most angry is
the passivity of those with a conscience in the world of crisis and
it is Clay, the blank narrator of Ellis's first novel, _Less Than
Zero_ who, he has stated, troubles his creator more than any other
character he has written about.[16] For Clay is the passive
observer, and indeed the voyeur of decline and degradation who,
while pricked by the stirrings of a moral conscience, cannot break
his paradoxical bored fascination with banal decadence and
self-destruction.
_Less Than Zero_ begins with the now emblematic line "People are
afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles."[17] This aphorism is
the core of Ellis' output, this 'failure to merge' gaining the
internal force of Forster's "only connect" as a maxim to live life
by. Ellis' horror of his generation's 'failure to merge' is also
represented by references to a billboard with the troubling message
"Disappear Here." Is this a warning, a command, an offer or a
rhetorical statement on the lives of Clay and his friends? Does Los
Angeles consume its citizens so that they disappear?[18] Does the
commodified life of easy luxury cause the individual, and more
importantly, the individual moral will to disappear? As Clay sinks
into the totally bored yet fascinated voyeurism of watching his
friend Julian treat his body as the ultimate commodity by selling it
to the older man in the bedroom of the Saint Marquis he states: "I
don't close my eyes. You can disappear here without knowing it."
This theme of disappearance continues throughout Ellis' work. People
go missing and are barely noticed, whether killed by vampires or
serial killers. In the world of spectacle and bored disinterest such
transgressive mutations are beyond society's capacity to recognize.
Patrick Bateman cannot convince anyone that he is the horror that is
his transgressive ontology. His is a postmodern attempt to confront
the vacuity of existence. As Benko states what is new "is not that
the world has little or no meaning, but that we should feel the
constant need to give it meaning."[19] Bateman does it by killing.
_Glamorama_ does it by branding.
Yet even in the midst of such ontological desperation there is the
continual mention that people physically disappear or, in a world of
media technology, people's identities start to disappear as a result
of deliberate erasure and manipulation as in the case of Victor in
_Glamorama_ . Yet disappearance posits that these people actually
appeared in the first case. Ellis seem to imply that such is the
marginality of modern existence that appearance (that is existence
-- to appear) in any traditional sense is highly problematic, is in
fact near nigh unattainable for those of his generation. For this is
a generation that not only cannot care, but does not want to care.
For to care would be to open oneself up to the pain of existence.
Ellis was raised an agnostic and has stated that he doesn't believe
in God and yet his books are anything but the "rigidly nihilistic"
outlook he claims to possess.[20] What he does not do is slip over
into the banal superficial spirituality of his contemporary Douglas
Coupland who, in _Life after God_, attempted to offer a spiritual
panacea to that generation born in the 1960s and 1970s who came of
age 'after God'. Coupland's plea is that his generation has, in some
way, been short-changed by the irreligiousity of their baby-boomer
parents who pursued a materialistic existence at the expense of true
humanity:
I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think
the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully
believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched
everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price
we paid for the loss of God[21].
The alternative is the nihilistic sarcasm offered by a character
stating:
And its not like I'm lost or anything. We're all too fucking
middle-class to ever be lost. Lost means you had faith or
something to begin with and the middle-class never really had
any of that. So we can never be lost...[22]
Ellis' version of this is far more chilling. In _Less Than Zero_
Clay confronts Rip who has repeatedly raped a twelve year old girl
drugged and tied to a bed. Clay, breaking out of his inertia, tells
Rip he does not think that this is right. Rip asks "What is right?"
claiming that if you want something you take it, that you have the
right to take or do anything. Clay's protest is the blandly
ineffective "But you don't need anything. You have everything." Rip
disagrees because "I don't have anything to lose." Later, in
_American Psycho_ Clay's passivity and Rip's nihilism coalesce in
Patrick Bateman's statement on the (then coming) ~fin de siecle~ :
Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste,
failure, grief, were things, emotions that no one really felt
anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is
its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted.
Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning
in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and
jagged...[23]
The contrast is Coupland's concluding plea that he needs God because
he is "sick and can no longer make it alone...as I seem beyond being
able to love." The counter that is offered by Ellis are characters
who do not seek God but rather cannot even remember whether or not
they once belonged:
"Are you a Catholic?" I asked him.
We walked a little while before he finally answered. "I don't
remember."[24]
For Ellis, being able to love is a secondary issue and in a
'hardbody' world love is a sign of weakness anyway. Lust, the taking
and giving of a body and a self to be consumed for pleasure, the
commodification of sexuality into an exchange of gratification and
debasement is all we can seem to hope for. Alienated from each other
we are now alienated from ourselves as well. For love can only occur
when people are aware of what it is to be human. So in Ellis' world,
Coupland's cry is that of someone who, in a sense, already has it
all. Perhaps it is also evidence of a naivety that fails to truly
understand the apocalyptic nature of contemporary existence. For as
we learn in _Glamorama_ "the zeitgeist's in limbo."
Ellis's latest novel, _Glamorama_, is a hallucinogenic sprawl through
a ~fin de siecle~ world that has failed to learn the lessons of
_American Psycho_ . If the culture of consumption was the fifth
horseman of the apocalypse then in _Glamorama_ the apocalypse has, to
all intents and purposes occurred -- and no one noticed. The novel
begins with two epigrams, one by Krishna, "There was not a time when
you or I nor these things did not exist" and one by Hitler, "You make
a mistake if you see what we do as merely political." Ellis has
stated that these mimic "what the book was about", that they point to
a book that is both "light" and "dark." As such they act as a key for
the reader, "a signifier for people when they enter the book to know
what they are getting into. A way to guide them through the
text."[25]
_Glamorama_ is a novel obsessed with the ambiguity of existence.
Nothing is what it seems, reality is fluid, life and identity are
unstable. Whether it is the mantra that "out is in" and "in is out",
or "~no~ trend is ~the~ new trend", or that "Paul Verhoeven said
~God~ is bisexual..." nothing just ' is' anymore. It is a
body-fascist world where "the better you look, the more you see"
[26], a world where a dinner party of models is filmed "...since
we're all basically advertising ourselves and in the end we're all
linked because we 'get it'."[27] A world where reality can be
digitally, cinematically, ontologically altered at whim, a world
where "better" and "worse" are claimed not to matter anymore because
no one cares about those meanings. Rather, we adapt to change in a
world without truth. Yet the only way out seems to be a retreat into
the New Age banalities of the celebrity Guru as exemplified by Deepak
Chopra who tells Victor, (echoing the classic hard rock song by Blue
Oyster Cult) "Don't fear the reaper." Victor's reply of ontological
gnosis is to mutter to himself "I ~am~ the fucking reaper, Deepak."
Victor's self-knowledge reveals him to be the every man of ~fin de
siecle~ celebrity culture in the same way that Patrick Bateman was
for status obsessed '80s yuppie culture. Victor is the slacker
incarnation of Bateman, someone who with his obsession with celebrity
culture wrecks destruction in a similar fashion. If Bateman
exemplified a world of hostile takeovers and asset stripping, of a
Protestant work ethic subverted into the business of violence, then
Victor exemplifies a culture so consumed by superficiality that it
creates a spiritual death. What has occurred is that the obsessions
of Bateman's yuppie aesthetic have now become the staples of
mainstream culture and entertainment, what Steve Redhead terms the
millennial blues. This is the condition of recognizing not only do we
live in a hyper-real world but the real to which it refers is itself
only the media culture[28] -- to all intents and purposes a
post-hyper-real which references " a reality that has already been
mediated and digested; a veritable 'post (realist)
realism'"[29].Ellis asks if we can escape from such hyper-accentuated
decline, in a land, a culture that Baudrillard has described as an
immoral dystopia, yet a dystopia that exists as both ending and new
beginning.[30]
Such a dystopia is presented as paradoxically both inevitable yet
also existential, what Baudrillard terms the 'achieved utopia' that
is "confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence."[31]
It is a dialectical society that Ellis writes into being, his novels
positing various forms of antithetical dystopia to the American
dream. In writing of dystopia perhaps, he seems to be saying, we can
be outraged to synthesize a more realistic utopia. The danger always
with such dialectical appropriations is that the implied synthesis
often is remade more in line with the antithesis than original
thesis, a synthesis that is 'more focussed on and based on
destructiveness than creativity'.[32]
The problem is that such a synthesis will be existential at heart.
What Ellis warns us is that decline is resultant upon our decisions.
We choose the antithesis. We desire it. We create our own
destruction. The inevitability of decline is the inevitability of our
choices in a superficial, amoral world. So at the close of
_Glamorama_ (in a nod to eternal recurrence) we get a flashback to
a younger Victor having to decide if he will embrace the ethos of
'Glamorama':
At first I was confused by what passed for love in this world:
people were discarded because they were too old or too fat or
too poor or they had too much hair or not enough, they were
wrinkled, they had no muscles, no definition, no ~tone~, they
weren't hip, they weren't remotely famous. This was how you
chose loves. This was what decided friends. And I had to accept
this if I wanted to get anywhere.[33]
Yet perhaps Ellis is doing nothing more than simply rewriting the
traditional highbrow critique of the masses. John Carey has noted
the prejudices of the literary intelligensia, stating "...to
highbrows, looking across the gulf, it seemed that the masses were
not simply degraded and threatening but also not fully alive. A
common allegation is that they lack souls..."[34] Therefore we get
Ellis' description of Clay and Victor as "zombies"[35], the
impersonal evilness of Patrick Bateman,[36] the continued presence
of vampires, and characters and cultures blatantly, celebriously,
exhaustively, superficial, commodified and soulless. No one, it
seems, can really escape; rather this is the terminal identity of a
mass culture in decline.
Yet there is one thing that sets Ellis apart from his predecessors
-- he does not distance himself from that which he critiques. He is
speaking from within, not above mass culture. He writes as one who
has been created and celebrated by that which both destroys yet
invigorates him, a society that provides both his ontology and his
state of sinful fallenness. He is the puritan moralist who, in
confronting society, is first and foremost confronting himself,
stating "As a writer, I seem to respond to flaws in my generation
that I see to be widespread and I react to them as a novelist."[37]
And the fatal flaw is that his generation has been raised on mass
culture to a degree where all is open to consumption, where life
gets edited and rearranged according to the conventions of MTV,
where style triumphs over substance. Ellis has described his
generation (born in the 1960s) as the first "to have really grown up
in the shadow of the video revolution."[38] A situation Stjepan
Mestrovic has described as "...an endless stream of images that
distorts violence, sexual licence, and the ethic of anomie into
'fun' themes, mixed with rock & roll."[39] So while "rock and roll"
becomes Sean Bateman's epigrammatic response to life in _The Rules
of Attraction_, it has to be read on a deeper level as that which
now provides the ontology for the dislocated.
This reaches its most absurd in _American Psycho_ where Patrick
Bateman displays his total dislocation by celebrating three of the
most banal and mainstream popular music acts of the 1980s: Genesis,
Huey Lewis and the News and Whitney Houston. His celebrations of
these performers' ~oeuvre~ is a deliberative swipe at those pop
culture critics who claim to find a serious purpose, even a workable
ontology, in popular music. Yet in his work Ellis is exhibiting the
same concerns that those very critics attempt to present -- a
critique of 'the age' from within. Writing in _Artforum
international_ in 1985 Greil Marcus linked _Less Than Zero_ into the
Manson family ethos, yet without the apocalyptic ethic. For if the
Manson carnage was supposed to have occurred out of apocalyptic
readings of the 'classic rock' ~Helter Skelter~ by the Beatles off
_The White Album_ (1968), then Ellis' post-Manson dysfunctional
family tend to be operating to ephemeral 'pop music', or the
nihilistic self-hatred of non-politicized American punk. These later
styles operate as an ever present soundtrack to dysfunctional lives
but do not operate in a 'meaningful' way: "...in _Less Than Zero_
pop music is just weather -- everybody talks about it but nobody
does anything about it."[40] In fact the only person in the novel
who does anything about pop music is the televangelist who smashes
records claiming they will harm the young who are the future of the
country.
Yet if Ellis' riffing on the current state of society has any
resonance outside the world of 'blank fiction'[41] (that catchall
phrase for 'young' writers confrontational in their subject matter
and presentation) it is in the world of rock journalism. The phrase
'blank fiction' is taken to echo the ethos of New York punk nihilism
as exemplified by the seminal punk anthem "blank generation" by
Richard Hell and the Voidoids[42]. Hell's 1977 song has as its
chorus the claim:
I belong to the blank generation
And I can take it or leave it each time
Well, I belong to the ____ generation
But I can take it or leave it each time
Hell has claimed that the emptiness of the blank space of the ____
is to give the latitude of not caring, of giving as much latitude as
possible to those trying to analyse just what was meant by
"blank."[43] In a sense this is what has occurred in the novels of
Bret Easton Ellis, the blankness opens up a world of competing
opportunities: a generation that is post punk, that even takes its
nihilism second hand, commodified through MTV. George Stade has
described the characters of _The Informers_ as "...above all, they
know their rock-and-roll, sounds of the silence within them."[44]
Yet this is only partly true, for it is only really the post-Manson
valley kids of LA in _Less Than Zero_ and _The Informers_ who 'know
their rock and roll'. For on the whole, Ellis' consumers know the
sight but not the sound of their rock and roll; music has become a
MTV image to be consumed, not a sound to be listened to. Patrick
Bateman exhibits the corruption of taste by commercial consumption
most blatantly in his naive critiques of his favourite popular acts.
By _Glamorama_ music has receded to a cinematic or catwalk
soundtrack, there only to serve the commodified image.
Yet if we are to fully understand Ellis and his blankness -- and
fully understand its fatal flaw then, ironically, we have to turn to
a classic piece of rock journalism. For rock criticism is the
template for Ellis' style, his moralistic outrage, his writing of
characters who seem too blank to be really alive and yet we are
expected to take their thoughts, words and actions as being worthy
of notice. What Ellis has done is taken the ethic of the great rock
critics out of the world of music journalism and transported it into
the realm of the novel, ending up with a hybrid form. Greil Marcus'
presentation in _The Dustbin of History_ of the issues lying behind
the rock critic's task could easily have come out of a critique of
Ellis' intent:
The worry that our sense of history, as it takes place in
everyday culture, is cramped, impoverished, and debilitating;
that the commonplace assumption that history exists only in the
past is a mystification powerfully resistant to any critical
investigations that might reveal this assumption to be a fraud,
or a jail. The suspicion is that we are living out history,
making and unmaking it -- forgetting it, denying it -- all of
the time, in far more ways than we have really learned.[45]
In a strange twist, it was while searching for references to Richard
Hell's song that I stumbled across the piece of writing that, if it
hasn't acted as the template for Ellis' ~oeuvre~ is then
disturbingly prescient. Entitled "Richard Hell: Death Means Never
Having To Say You're Incomplete" it is written by the great 'gonzo'
rock critic Lester Bangs[46] and was originally published in _Gig_
magazine (1978).[47]
Bangs' article begins, as do Ellis' novels with a collection of
epigrams,[48] mixing high and low culture, in effect acting as the
work in outline. The beginning of the article could almost be lifted
straight from one of Ellis' novels, mixing self-confession, sex and
the privileging of mass media as both the new location for truth and
the drugs of modern existence. This opening paragraph concludes in
what could be a precis of mock-Ellis:
In the time of hedonist fascism nobody dares scream or judge
what is so pathetically suspended in mid-air, which is life
itself -- nobody till now, that is. Meaning that if you're not
mad you're crazy -- we are being eaten body and soul and no one
is fighting. In fact practically no one sees it, but if you
listen to the poets you will hear, and vomit up your rage.
Richard Hell is one of the poets.[49]
Ellis mixes the nihilistic programme of Hell[50] with the 'ultimate
rejection' of that programme as expressed by Bangs the cultural
critic. Bangs refers to an interview Hell gave to Legs McNeil in
_Punk_ magazine in early 1976 where Hell references Nietzsche on the
collapse of emotions. Bangs' response is, in many ways, the template
for Ellis' oeuvre:
...I was interested, because it seemed to me then, as it does
now, that the only questions worth asking today are whether
humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the
quality of life will be if the answer is no.[51]
All of Ellis' work could be seen as playing out this particular
question, yet nowhere have I ever been able to find reference to any
influence of Bangs upon the young Ellis, who would have been 17 when
this article first appeared. Yet the similarities are remarkable. In
Hell we get the template for all the nihilistic, disaffected
antiheroes,[52] in Bangs we get the riffing style, the epigrams, the
high-low culture mix, the central question and ultimately, the
rejection of that which is used to serve as critique on contemporary
existence. For Bangs' rejection of Hell's ethic, even as he remains
a solid fan of his work, echoes Ellis' love-hate relationship with
that he writes about. While Bangs can rise above Hell's narcissistic
nihilism and offer a claim for the transcendence of life and art,
Ellis can only obliquely do so. In considering Ellis in light of
this article by Bangs it becomes clear that Ellis is torn between
Hell and Bangs. He has the analytical outrage of Hell, his critique
of the narcissistic nihilism of his age -- yet, as Bangs states of
Hell, "...he doesn't transcend his self-hate." For Ellis thinks like
Hell but attempts to write like Bangs, yet without Bangs'
fundamental, thoughtful, perceptive joy in the transcendence of art
and existence. As Bangs writes of Hell:
Look, I started out this thing saying how much I ~respected~
this guy's mind and perceptions. I still do, in a curious way
-- its just that he paints half the picture of total reality
with consummate brilliance, and the other half is Crayola
slashes across a field of silly putty and Green Slime. In other
words, he's got a great grasp of the ~problems~ of being alive
in the seventies, but his solutions suck.[53]
And therein lies the fundamental issue concerning Ellis. Like Hell
he can locate the problems of existence, but unlike Bangs he cannot
offer an alternative -- yet he still imitates the man who, in a
strange twist, offered the best critique of his work before it was
even written. Ellis' novels therefore exist as forms of moral
outrage, dated, in a sense, before they are even published. So it
appears that Ellis remains trapped as a chronicler of his own
imagined past; aware 'that history is sinking' yet unable to offer
any alternative -- the Richard Hell of his own blank generation, who
apes the style, but lacks the belief of Lester Bangs.
Notes:
--------------------
[1] Gray, Rockwell, _The Imperative of Modernity, An Intellectual
Biography of Jose Ortega y Gasset_, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989, pgs. 194, 195.
[2] Stoekel, Alan, ed. _On Bataille_, Yale French Studies Number 78,
Yale, 1990, p.100
[3] "If I thus consume immoderately, reveal to my fellow beings that
which I am ~intimately~: Consumption is the way in which ~separate~
beings communicate. Everything shows through, everything is open and
infinite between those who consume intensely. But nothing counts
then; violence is released and it breaks forth without limits, as
the heat increases." George Bataille, _The Accursed Share_
(pp.58-59); source Norman O. Brown, _Apocalypse and/or
metamorphosis_ Berkeley: University of California Press,1991,
pgs.192-193.
[4] Gasset, Jose Ortega Y, _The Revolt of The Masses_, auth. trans.,
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932, p.201.
[5] Mestrovic, Stjepan, _The Coming Fin De Siecle: An application of
Durkheim's Sociology to Modernity and Postmodernism_, London:
Routledge, 1991, p.4.
[6] Baudelaire, Charles, _The Painter of Modern Life and other
essays_, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon, 1964/1995,
p.32.
[7] ~On the critique of saints~. To have a virtue, must one really
wish to have it in its most brutal form -- as the Christian saints
wished -- and needed it? They could endure life only by thinking
that the sight of their virtue would engender self-contempt in
anyone who saw them. But a virtue with that effect I call brutal.
Friedrich Nietzsche, _The Gay Science_, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New
York: Vintage, 1974, Book Three, 150.
[8] Gasset, Jose Ortega Y, _Man and Crisis_, trans. Mildred Adams,
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959, p.88.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Jaime Clark, "An interview with Bret Easton Ellis" part two
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8506/Ellis/clarkeint.html
[11] Spengler, Oswald, _The Decline of the West_, auth. trans. C.F.
Atkinson, 2nd .ed. vol.1., London: George Allen & Unwin, c.1926,
p.xiii.
[12] Ibid., Table One (end papers, vol.1).
[13] Hebidge, Dick, "postmodernism and the 'other side'" in D.
Morely and K-H Chen eds. _Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies_, London: Routledge, 1996, p.187.
[14] see Linda Bradley, _Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic_,
Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1995, pgs.3-10.
[15] Casey McKinney, " A rather aoelin, probably should have been
edited better, conversation with Bret Easton Ellis," ~Mall Punk~
http://www.animalstories.net/stories_mpunk/mckinneycasey/
[16] Mark Amerika & Alexander Laurence, "Interview with Bret Easton
Ellis," _The Write Stuff_ 1994
http://www.altx.com/int2/bret.easton.ellis.html
[17] This aphorism is subverted in Ellis' subsequent novel, _The
Rules of Attraction_ when Clay, now a decidedly minor character,
states: "People are afraid to walk across campus after midnight.
Someone on acid whispers this to me, in my ear, one Sunday dawn
after I have been up on crystal meth most of the week, crying, and I
know it is true." p.182.
[18] _Less Than Zero_ concludes with an apocalyptic vision of the
inhabitants of Los Angeles being driven mad by the city, of parents
feasting on their children; images that remain Clay's single point
of reference. pgs. 207-208.
[19] Georges Benko, "Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity and the
Social Sciences" in G. Benko & U. Strohmayer eds. _Space and Social
Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity_, Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1998, p.25.
[20] Robert Love, "Rolling Stone Interview," _Rolling Stone_ no.61
April 4 1991 in _Contemporary Literary Criticism_ vol.71,1992,
pgs.166-167.
[21] Coupland, Douglas, _Life after God_, New York: Pocket Books,
1994, p.273.
[22] Ibid., p.305.
[23] Ellis, Bret Easton, _American Psycho_, New York: Vintage, 1991,
p.373.
[24] Ellis, Bret Easton, _The Rules of Attraction_, London: Picador,
1988, p.78.
[25] McKinney interview.
[26] Ellis, Bret Easton, _Glamorama_, London: Picador, 1998, p. 81.
See also where Victor, in discussion with Lauren states "Like in
this world...my mind matters more than my abs. Oh boy, raise your
hand if you believe that..." p.110.
[27] Ibid., p.273.
[28] Redhead, Steve, _Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues: The
Transformation of Soccer Culture_, London: Routledge, 1997, p103
[29] Ibid., p4.
[30] Baudrillard's statement on New York succinctly summarizes
Ellis' aesthetic: "It is a world completely rotten with wealth,
power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene,
poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and
yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning
of the universe." Jean Baudrillard, _America_, trans. C. Turner,
London; Verso, 1988/1993 (orig.1986), p.23.
[31] Ibid., p.77.
[32] This point arises in a brief article from 1966 discussing some
of the implications of Altizer's 'death of God' theology: Ellis W.
Hollon, jr. "Beware the Antithesis!" _The Christian Century_ March 9
1966, p. 304. Hollon was Professor of Philosophy at Middle Tennessee
State University and was providing a philosophical critique of what
he discerned to be dialectical underpinnings in the thought of
Thomas Altizer who achieved considerable notoriety in the 1960s in
raising issues of Christian atheism.
[33] Ellis, _Glamorama_, p.480.
[34] Carey, John, _The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and
Prejudice amongst the Literary Intelligensia 1880-1939_ London:
Faber & Faber 1992, p.10.
[35] See Amerika and Laurence interview where Ellis calls Clay "...
a zombie surfer dude..." and Jaime Clarke interview where Ellis
states "...Victor Ward is a fashion zombie."
[36] Bateman recognises his "total depersonalization", blankly
stating "I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a
human being, with only a dim corner of my mind operating"
_American Psycho_, p.282.
[37] Bret Easton Ellis, "The Globe.com Chat Transcript",
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8506/Ellis/globechat.html
[38] Bret Easton Ellis in _Contemporary Literary Criticism Yearbook
1985_, Vol. 39, ed. Sharon K. Hall, p.55.
[39] Mestrovic, p.7.
[40] Marcus, Greil, "Speaker to Speaker", _Artforum International_,
September 1985, p.12.
[41] See Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveny, _Shopping in Space_, New
York: Grove Press with Serpent's Tail,1992; James Annesley, _Blank
Fictions_, London: Pluto Press, 1988; and Kathryn Hume, _American
Dream, American Nightmare_, Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2000, for discussions on the varieties and ethos of 'blank
fiction'.
[42] Richard Hell and the Voidoids, _Blank Generation_, Sire
6037,1977.
Hell is commonly regarded as the originator of the Malcolm McLaren
constructed Sex Pistols/punk ethos. McLaren had briefly been manager
of The New York Dolls in the early 1970s and is up front about his
appropriation of not only Hell's 'distressed' look but also his song
"blank generation."
As McLaren states "Richard Hell was a definite, 100 per cent
inspiration, and, in fact, I remember telling the Sex Pistols,
"Write a song like "Blank Generation" but write your own bloody
version" and their own version was "Pretty Vacant"... These are the
things I brought back [to England]: the image of this distressed,
strange thing called Richard Hell. And this phrase, "the punk
generation." Source: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, _Please Kill
Me. The uncensored oral history of Punk_, New York: Grove
Press,1996, p.199.
[43] Ibid.,p.282.
[44] Stade, George, "Hopping, Popping and Copping", _New York Times
Book Review_ vol.99, 18 September 1994,p.14.
[45] Marcus, Greil, _The Dustbin of History_, Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1995, p.3.
[46] Lester Bangs (b.1948; d.1982) author, musician and editor of
_Creem_ magazine.
[47] Lester Bangs, "Richard Hell: Death means never having to say
you're incomplete" in Greil Marcus ed. _Psychotic Reactions and
Carburetor Dung_, New York: Vintage, 1987, pgs.260-268.
[48] Bangs quotes Richard Hell, Celine and Huysmans, p.260.
[49] Ibid.,p.261.
[50] Bangs reports Hell as stating "...the thing is that people
don't have to ~try~ not to feel anything anymore; they just ~can't~
..." p.261.
[51] Ibid., p.262.
[52] Bangs mentions that Hell's favourite books are Lautreamont's
_Maldoror_ "which Richard used to read regularly during a period
when he thought he was a vampire" and Huysman's _Against Nature_,
from which Bangs quotes for his epigram. The issue of vampires is
interesting for in Ellis' work, vampires, or a vampiric threat, are
always one of the minor themes.
[53] Ibid., p267.
--------------------
Mike Grimshaw teaches Religious Studies at University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand. He is currently working on two projects:
"The Incarnation in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and
"Modernist Architecture and the Death of God."
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