The final chapter in this book turns to three important post-war writers whose fiction explores the psychological effects of postmodernity on the individuals who live in it: J. G. Ballard, Don DeLillo, and Bret Easton Ellis. Their work can therefore be (and has been) considered in relation to the theories of postmodernism and postmodernity with which we began this book, especially those by the ‘Holy Trinity’ of postmodern theorists, Jameson, Lyotard, and Baudrillard. Indeed Ballard and DeLillo in particular have been regarded as theorists-by-proxy themselves, producing the kind of work Noel King has termed ‘ficto-criticism’, writing which uses fiction explicitly to analyse cultural and social patterns as an alternative to ‘pure’ theory (King, 1991).
The discussion will focus on key novels by each writer: Ballard's Crash, DeLillo's White Noise and Libra, and Ellis's American Psycho. Each of these novels depict, in different ways, a world which is increasingly divorced from the real as a result of the pervasive power of technology and systems of representation which dominate our culture: television, the media, advertising, and marketing. The consequence for the individual is that the self is experienced as being emptied of substance, lacking coherence and consistency. In each case the implication is that the logic of the ‘Möbius strip’ (a geometrical twisted figure-of-eight structure where the outside edge becomes the inside and vice versa) operates with regard to what were once stable boundaries between society and the individual, private and public, inside and outside. ‘External’ social patterns, such as the logic of the surface and the image, are replicated on the ‘inside’ of the self, while, conversely, private individual desires, fantasies and anxieties seem to shape wider social and cultural dynamics.
A particular feature of the psychology of the characters depicted in the work of the three writers in question here is what J. G. Ballard once called ‘the death of affect’. ‘Affect’ is a term used by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to refer to emotion, as in ‘being affected by’ something. It is assumed that this is a fundamental part of existing as a normal social being, because it is how we make sense of our own experiences, and – crucially – how we empathize with the experiences of those around us. Ballard's conviction is that our ability to feel genuine emotion has been disappearing since the late twentieth century. Support for this idea comes in Jameson's reading of the pathologies of postmodernity in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, central to which is a ‘waning of affect’. Jameson, we recall, argues that postmodernity has ushered in a change in the structure of expressing and feeling emotions. Where once we had anxiety, neurosis, and anomie, expressions of ‘the centred subject’, now, ‘since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling’ we are more subject to the more ‘free-floating and impersonal’ emotions which Lyotard terms ‘intensities’ (Jameson, 1991, 16).
Another thing that unites the fiction considered in this chapter is that its postmodernism operates chiefly at the level of content rather than form. Throughout this book I have been suggesting that if there is anything that defines the many different kinds of fiction to have been labelled ‘postmodern’ over the past four decades or so it is to be identified at the level of form. In other words, it is not what postmodern fiction tells us that makes it postmodern, it is what it does. Specifically, postmodern fiction reminds readers of the nature of fictionality and causes them to reflect upon the process of deriving meaning from narrative. The work of Ballard, DeLillo, and Ellis for the most part provides something of an exception to this rule in that it eschews the kind of radical formal experimentation favoured by earlier postmodernists (there are exceptions in some of the early work of the first two writers, while there are subtly metafictional elements to Ellis's American Psycho, as I shall show). Because these writers have been linked so consistently to postmodernism it would be impossible to ignore them in a book such as this. Yet for the reasons mentioned above, their work does also emphasize the constructed nature of postmodern existence, its dependence upon narrative and representation, in a way that provides a fascinating complement to the more overtly self-reflexive writing of authors considered previously in this book.
In fact, reading the work of these novelists suggests that so completely has our experience of reality become shaped by postmodern systems of representation that a neat separation of ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’, of ‘world’ and ‘book’, upon which the category of metafiction depends, is actually no longer tenable and even rather quaint. As such, the novels considered here underline the point which other postmodern fictions dealt with in this book have made repeatedly, that real life is mediated through narrative and aesthetic technique, just as much as fiction. They remind us, too, that fiction – whether or not it has been labelled ‘postmodern’ – is always, to some degree, self-reflexive.
In an introduction written to accompany the 1975 French edition of his novel, Crash (1973), J. G. Ballard explains the psychopathologies which drive contemporary society:
the marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world.…Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia.…Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings – these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect.
(Ballard, 1995a, 4)
Where twentieth-century existence was underscored by an increasing faith in rationality, embodied in the application of scientific and logical principles to social communication and systems of social life, such as communications and the media, technology, cars and aeroplanes, and the cinema, Ballard also thinks that this resulted in a perverse counter-effect whereby such developments tap into and massage, perhaps even produce, the irrational desires within us all. The advances of technology, he thinks, effect a return to a kind of infantile state, ‘where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly’ (4).
More precisely, Ballard argues that the intensities of the twentieth century have resulted in a reversal of the roles played in everyday existence by the world of fiction and the world of reality: ‘In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination’ (Ballard, 1995a, 4). This stable opposition has now been eroded. Ballard's view is that where once we would retreat from everyday social reality into the world of our imagination – serviced by art forms such as the novel and cinema – now the outside world is so ‘fictional’ as a result of the systems of ‘mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising’, that ‘[t]he most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads’ (4).
The experience is like living ‘inside an enormous novel’, and this reversal presents the writer of fiction with a special challenge. The author's task is no longer to ‘preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance’, inventing ‘a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world’ and disregarding questions about his own ‘motives, prejudices and psychopathology’. Rather he ought to be more like the ‘scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject’. This author has a duty to reject the stance of ‘moral authority’ favoured by the writers of realist novels and instead offer the reader ‘the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives’ (5–6).
Although brief, Ballard's Introduction to Crash amounts to an extraordinarily vital and enduringly relevant manifesto for postmodern fiction, at once in tune with the critiques of realism being advanced by novelists like B. S. Johnson and John Barth and cultural critics like Susan Sontag in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also prefiguring more sustained critiques of postmodern culture mounted in the 1980s by the likes of Jameson (who uses a number of similar terms to Ballard) and Jean Baudrillard. It perhaps goes without saying that the Introduction also sketches out the landscape of Ballard's own fiction.
Yet what is curious about Ballard is that most of his fiction is, on the surface, much less radical than one might expect from one who rejects the English ‘bourgeois novel’ so strongly and argues for writers to be ‘scientists on safari’ who empty the contents of their heads on to the page. While the form of some of Ballard's 1970s short stories and his extraordinary collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) – which parallels the techniques of 1950s and 1960s ‘Pop Artists’ by assembling a series of ‘condensed novels’ to create a spatial effect, as if each scene or motif is a 3-D object which we can walk around and view from different perspectives – is ‘experimental’, the rest of Ballard's fiction appears rather conventional, favouring linear plots narrated in a consistent third-person ‘omniscient’ voice.
However, critics have suggested that it is in fact Ballard's superficial ‘normality’ that makes his work so unsettling. Roger Luckhurst has argued that Ballard's distinctive strategy in his fiction is to unsettle the distinction between generic boundaries and thus disturb our expectations (Luckhurst, 1997). Andrzej Gasiorek has argued that the use of a traditional linear structure to accommodate shocking subject-matter refuses to allow readers any ‘distance’ or ‘estrangement’ from the content, inviting them into the novel in a familiar realist way but then making them feel uncomfortable (Gasiorek, 2007, 17).
This is certainly what happens in Ballard's Crash, which the author describes as ‘an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis’ (Ballard, 1995a, 6). The novel clearly also puts into practice the strategy of refusing the ‘moral authority’ of the realist writer, instead ‘offer[ing] the reader the contents of [the writer’s] head’ (5–6). Given its subject-matter, though, it is natural for readers to wonder about Ballard's sanity (as did the writer of a publisher's report on the novel in 1971, who famously wrote ‘This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish’).
Crash is a particularly graphic exploration of the erotics of the car crash, its underlying thesis spelled out by a comment by William Burroughs, one of Ballard's key influences, that ‘an auto crash can be more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture’ (Burroughs, 2001, 7). Narrated by ‘Ballard’, it tells the story of Vaughan, a former ‘TV scientist’ whose existence is governed by sexual fantasies about women and car crashes. ‘Ballard’ becomes Vaughan's ‘assistant’ and accompanies him on visits to the crash-tests at the Road Research Laboratory in West London and on tours of the motorways seeking out ‘nightmare collisions’, stopping to watch the rescue attempts, even filming a fatally-injured woman driver when first to arrive on the scene. He watches uncomfortably as Vaughan takes women to have sex in crashed cars in scrapwrecking yards.
As well as these real crashes he and Vaughan endlessly imagine more and more exotic collisions, car-crash victims and wounds, especially those involving celebrities: Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus, and John F. Kennedy. Vaughan becomes the leader of an underground community of alienated people, all of whom have been victims of car crashes and who gather together to re-enact famous car crashes. Eventually he begins to stalk Elizabeth Taylor, taking pictures of her as she leaves her hotel room, which he combines with images of wounds from a textbook on plastic surgery to form a collage. Vaughan's ultimate fantasy is to die with the actress in a car crash and inevitably gets killed when he tries to smash ‘Ballard's’ car into the limousine in which Taylor is a passenger.
The novel is a kind of perverse postmodern reworking of the classic modernist mode, the retrospective narrative. ‘Ballard’ is fascinated by Vaughan much in the way that Nick Carraway is by Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. After Vaughan's death – and this is what gives his narrative much of its impetus – ‘Ballard’ subscribes increasingly to his friend’s perverse psychology and philosophy, telling his story in order to support Vaughan's conviction that he had discovered ‘the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology’ (Ballard, 1995b, 13). The surrogate novelist ‘Ballard’ thus plays the role of a ‘scientist on safari’, exploring unknown psycho-sexual territory.
The idea of a ‘new sexuality born from a perverse technology’ can be illuminated by what the theorist Mark Seltzer calls ‘wound culture’. A wound is where a body is literally torn apart, so someone looking at it is able to see what's inside, and what happens to the body when the surface is broken apart. ‘Wound culture’, Seltzer argues, is a powerful way of conceiving of modern and postmodern society. We are attracted to what Ballard calls the ‘atrocity exhibition’ on a mass scale, fascinated by ‘the shock of contact between bodies and technologies: a shock of contact that encodes, in turn, a breakdown in the distinction between the individual and the mass and between private and public registers’ (Seltzer, 1998, 253).
This is why, Seltzer argues, we are fascinated by depictions of violence in contemporary culture – especially artistic and media representations of serial killing, Seltzer's main subject – but, more generally, why we are preoccupied by events and artwork which show us ‘the opening of private and bodily and psychic interiors’ (Seltzer, 1998, 253). The work of Ballard, whom Seltzer describes as ‘one of the compulsive cartographers of wound culture’ (Seltzer, 1998, 264), is preoccupied by the collapsing of internal and external space, and the private and the public sphere. As Vaughan photographs the young accident-victim Gabrielle, ‘Ballard’ records that ‘her canny eyes were clearly aware of his real interest in her’ (Ballard, 1995b, 100) – and this not just the literal opening of her body suggested by her scars, nor even her sex (an outdated term for which is ‘wound’), but the desire to see into the interior of her body and psyche.
In his ‘photographic workshop’ (Ballard, 1995b, 96), where there are hundreds of photographs of crashes and victims, Vaughan hands ‘Ballard’ Gabrielle's ‘dossier’, which documents first the crash scene in which she is surrounded by police, medics, and spectators, then her severe injuries in the crash, then the wreckage of her car, then her recuperation in hospital. With huge scars on her legs, leg clamps and back braces, she comes to seem a more permanent embodiment of the marriage between technology and sex which is momentarily enacted with every car crash. The car crash has transformed her radically, from ‘a conventional young woman whose symmetrical face and unstretched skin spelled out the whole economy of a cosy and passive life, of minor flirtations in the backs of cheap cars enjoyed without any sense of the real possibilities of her body’ to a woman ‘reborn’ as a deeply sexualized cyborg, a hybrid combination of human sexuality and the erotics of technology. The motorized chromium wheelchair she occupies – a miniature car to which the body is welded – has the effect of making her openly sexualized, emphasizing her knees and pubis to the men who look on, her male physiotherapist, Vaughan, and ‘Ballard’: ‘The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex’ (Ballard, 1995b, 99). The continual references to fluids, both manufactured and bodily (semen and blood from the human, and engine coolant and petrol from the car) symbolizes the merging of inside and outside, human being and machine. Gabrielle is only in fact the most obvious example of a character who exhibits change outwardly as a way of advertising the change in psychology inside. Vaughan himself, who seems to be permanently attached to his camera, embodies this combination, as if he is not just the possessor of a new psychology, but an example of a new species formed by the blending together of sex and technology.
This summary ought to be enough to suggest why Crash is one of the most notorious novels of the twentieth century and was the subject of much moral outrage. Yet as extreme and perverse as its story is, it develops, on a number of levels, a serious critique of contemporary culture, more extensive than Ballard's Introduction.
To begin with, the novel's strategy is really just to make literal what is an enduring metaphor in contemporary culture: the status of the automobile as an eroticized object, most commonly suggested by a car being described as an ‘extension of a man's penis’. Its story depicts a culture in which the imaginary has come to stand in for the real – in Baudrillardian terms, a hyperreal world which can no longer distinguish original from copy. The characters in Crash engage with all the suggestive, sensual images of the car which are circulated through the marketing and advertising apparatus rather than its reality: a dangerous piece of technology which we should be wary of.
At one level the novel represents Ballard's amazement at how a rational, advanced society such as ours can tolerate the kind of ‘perverse technology’ involved in the production of high-speed motor cars – especially those highlighted by Ralph Nader in his famous 1956 exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed, which revealed that US car companies were reluctant to spend money on safety features, and, worse, included ‘designed-in dangers’ in their cars (e.g. the Chevrolet Corvair), such as an excessively heavy rear engine or a steering column that could impale the driver. For Ballard this is clear evidence of ‘some deviant logic unfolding…, more powerful than that provided by reason’ (Ballard, 1995b, 6). Crash explores the way in which human nature has changed as a result of the impact of modern technology, and how this is bound up with an unhealthy attitude towards mediatized celebrity and the image. Crash's characters can only experience sexual arousal while engaging with technology (cars obviously, but also architecture). At the heart of Vaughan's perverse activities are the devices of visual technology, such as the camera, film, and the photocopier (which Ballard uses to blow up the collage-pictures of Elizabeth Taylor).
This behaviour is evidence of the ‘death of affect’. One of the most distinctive features of all of Ballard's fiction – from the novels which immediately followed Crash, Concrete Island (1973) and High-Rise (1975) (the three making up what critics have called the ‘urban disaster trilogy’) to the more recent novels Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), and Millenium People (2003) – is the depiction of affectless characters. But rather than portraying a world of robotic people, playing out routine existence in emotional isolation from others, Ballard's dramatization of the ‘death of affect’ is a matter either of presenting characters who go through the motions of having ‘feelings’, in fact taking them to excess, as a kind of reflex action, a learned behaviour of how to act as if one were human, or depicting people who become aroused or stimulated by things which normally would not trigger desire in this way.
As with Ballard, critics respond to DeLillo's work not simply for its aesthetic merits, but because of its status as ‘ficto-criticism’. As his comments in interviews attest, the author himself is quite comfortable with this view of him as public intellectual rather than just private author, as he is deeply interested in ideas. The downside is that DeLillo's fiction, which often chooses ambitiously to deal with the crucial events in contemporary history head on (such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Libra, or 9/11 in Falling Man), has often been compared by critics to journalism, a form of writing predicated on fact and accurate insight, and found wanting. But DeLillo's fiction delivers an alternative kind of insight into contemporary culture and society not least because the dominant feature of the contemporary world is the way it is shaped by images and narratives, and fiction trades in precisely these things.
DeLillo's early novels, Americana (1971), End Zone (1972), and Ratner's Star (1976), bear affinities with the experimental tradition of US writing which privileged metafiction. However, his ‘breakthrough’ novel was the satirical White Noise, published in 1984, which has been the source of most critical interest in his work. It is set in the kind of hyperreal US suburban town which we all recognize from American sitcoms and Peter Weir's 1997 film The Truman Show, and features as protagonist Jack Gladney, a university professor in ‘Hitler Studies’ (a subject that enables him to salve his own fears of death as the monstrous mass murder of the Nazis makes them pale in comparison). Following a toxic spillage, the citizens start to become ill and the story tells of the evacuation of Jack and his family and his uncovering of a mystery about the drugs designed to alleviate the symptoms caused by the accident.
There is therefore an absorbing plot to White Noise. Yet the most interesting feature of the novel is the apparently incidental detail. Much of it is taken up with Jack (who is the narrator) recounting his perceptions of postmodern existence after observing his students and his family, reporting his discussions with his friend, fellow professor (of Popular Culture) Murray Siskind, and meditating on death. It is in this dimension of White Noise that the novel's preoccupation with one of the key aspects of the postmodern condition is revealed: the fact that contemporary culture is characterized by an overload of communication, information and representations, transmitted through the media, advertising and marketing systems, and the effect this has upon postmodern subjects.
‘White noise’ is the term for the cacophonic merging of sounds which we hear when TV reception is interrupted or during audio feedback, but has a more general sense – one that certainly figures in this novel – as referring to the babble of different messages transmitted constantly in our media-driven culture. The ‘airborne toxic event’ which constitutes the main dramatic catalyst to the novel's plot is paralleled by the effects of a more metaphorical ‘white noise’ of information systems. This is suggested in the novel by television, Siskind urging his students to ‘Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. “Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.”’ (DeLillo, 1984, 50–1). Where the airborne toxins cause those who come into contact with them to become unwell, so the cacophony of messages and signals propelled through the air by the various communications and informations systems of postmodernity cause the ‘health’ of the postmodern subject to deteriorate.
Two comic episodes in the novel are often cited by critics who see in them a parallel with Jean Baudrillard's diagnosis of postmodernity as a hyperreal culture, one in which the real is continually inaccessible and simulated through representations. The first is where Siskind and Gladney drive to see a tourist attraction known as ‘the most photographed barn in America’ and pass five signs advertising this fact before arriving – along with forty cars, a tour bus and tourists with cameras – at the site. Siskind, a kind of apologist for postmodernism, comments approvingly on the effect of the hype: ‘No one sees the barn.…Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn’ (DeLillo, 1984, 12). What he means is that the signs condition the viewers' response to the barn so that looking at it is a matter of witnessing the spectacle surrounding it rather than noticing anything significant about the barn itself. The image tourists are seeking is not the barn but the ‘aura’ about the barn's celebrity. It gives them a new spiritual sense of identity, which Siskind likens to a ‘religious experience’ (12).
The second episode is when Jack and his family are being evacuated to protect them from the effects of the toxic spillage. The evacuation is being co-ordinated by an organization called SIMUVAC, which one of its employees informs Jack stands for ‘simulated evacuation’, an important new state programme. When Jack points out that ‘this evacuation isn't simulated. It's real’, the technician replies: ‘We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model’. A real event, in other words, provides the opportunity to prepare for a more accurate simulation. Jack asks him how this is going, and is informed that:
The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like. There's a probability excess. Plus which we don't have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them.…You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real. There's a lot of polishing we still have to do.
(DeLillo, 1984, 139)
Both these events are illustrations of Baudrillard's conviction about how ‘the code’, or the systems which make the world meaningful, produces copies that stand in for the real. In fact they make it especially clear that Baudrillard's argument isn't simply about lamenting the loss of something present and stable (the real), but about how our experience of reality is actually produced by simulation. The most photographed barn itself is effectively produced by the aura surrounding it, because it is impossible to see it as anything else, while the simulated evacuation modelled by SIMUVAC is intended to condition real evacuations in future.
Everywhere in the world of White Noise is the sense that the constructions of the spheres of media, marketing, and advertising shape real events and behaviour rather than respond to them or represent them. Jack notices, for example, that the symptoms his daughters, Steffie and Denise, experience following the toxic spillage are precisely those which have been described in the news bulletin which precedes the one they are watching (according to an apparent logic which Elaine Showalter has noted in real epidemics such as ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ and ‘Toxic Shock Syndrome’ where the media seems to transmit symptoms via suggestions [Showalter, 1998]).
Similarly many of the incidental details in the novel suggest that the capacity of representations or words to reflect reality is severely weakened. The novel is full of references to food, but it is always the processed, packaged variety, purchased in the sterile world of the supermarket: peanuts, popcorn, pretzels, pizza, etc. Siskind (of course) celebrates the ‘flavorless packaging’ of the generic brands in his basket as ‘the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock’ (DeLillo, 1984, 18) but Gladney is disturbed that even the apparently authentic, natural products such as fruit have taken on the appearance of packaged foods: ‘The fruit was gleaming and wet, hard-edged. There was a self-conscious quality about it. It looked carefully observed, like four-color fruit in a guide to photography’ (DeLillo, 1984, 170).
At a more pervasive level White Noise suggests that language itself can no longer refer to reality. Throughout the novel there are references to the products, brand names, and companies which are omnipresent in the everyday experience of postmodernity, some real, some made up: Panasonic, The Airport Marriott, Dacron, Red Devil. DeLillo's strategy – comic but often strangely poignant – is to insert these names suddenly and randomly into passages of prose. When musing on his wife Babette's fear of death, for example, the paragraph ends with the words ‘Mastercard, Visa, American Express’. The strategy has the effect of demonstrating directly how the words bear no relation to reality, but at the same time also suggest that they take on a deeper, more mysterious, meaning in the lives of postmodern subjects. While asleep, Steffie utters two words which the listening Gladney assumes ‘have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or exotic chant’ – Toyota Celica: ‘A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform’ (DeLillo, 1984, 155).
White Noise diagnoses contemporary culture as one saturated by the logic of the representation. DeLillo approaches this question from a different angle in his next novel, Libra (1988), which was a huge bestseller in the United States. It tells the story of the real historical figure, Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who was arrested on suspicion of having shot President Kennedy in 1963 and who was then gunned down himself two days later by the mysterious Jack Ruby. More precisely Libra develops two narratives which gradually merge into one: besides Oswald's biography, it tells the story of a conspiracy begun by the CIA official Win Everett who decides, on the second anniversary of the Bay of Pigs (17th April 1963) that Kennedy's increasingly conciliatory attitude to Cuba must cease, and looks to create an ‘electrifying event’ to marshall popular and government opinion against the Cubans.
Both narratives are rooted in established historical fact, though like all the events surrounding the assassination of JFK they are both also full of gaps which DeLillo fills in through fictionalization. The conspiracy story, while plausible, is impossible to verify, and for this reason DeLillo was regarded by some commentators as having joined the ranks of the many conspiracy theorists who treat events in US political history with the greatest suspicion, and also the new leader of the US tradition of ‘paranoid novelists’, such as Burroughs, Mailer, and Pynchon.
But, as Frank Lentricchia has pointed out, DeLillo's novel does not actually advance a water-tight conspiracy theory. He leaves out many of the necessary elements required to make the conspiracy narrative surrounding the assassination most plausible, such as the conspirators somehow ensuring that Oswald was given the job at the Texas School Book Depository or that the motorcade would pass directly beneath his window in that building. The novel's real interest in the assassination and Oswald's role in it is because the event confirmed the degree to which American reality and history are dependent upon representations rather than the real. These representations generate a myriad narratives which are all plausible but, equally, are also virtual or fictional. Conspiracy theory is a classic example of this, as are other interpretations of Oswald's motives (but which remain speculative as so little is really known about him) such as his possible Oedipal desire to be the fatherless slayer of America's great father figure.
This points to one way of understanding the title. Oswald is a ‘negative libran’, and consequently considers his character as ‘somewhat steady and impulsive. Easily, easily, easily influenced. Poised to make the dangerous leap’ (DeLillo, 2006a, 315). Astrology is a system which shapes reality by explaining our actions according to a particular narrative or even determining how we act in a given situation. The fact that the title does not specifically identify Oswald as the Libran suggests that Libra is intended to signify more generally. Oswald is an extreme version of the way postmodernity makes us all into creatures of the image too. Libra figures perhaps as an alternative name for postmodern America: a country of subjects swallowed up by the logic of representation, easily influenced, impulsive and ready to make a ‘dangerous leap’.
The particular proliferation of narratives and representations, all of which separate us further from the real rather than take us closer to it, is why, according to N. H. Reeve, Libra is a postmodern historical novel very unlike Hutcheon's ‘historiographic metafiction’ which challenges and subverts established ‘official’ versions of history. The problem is that the story of John F. Kennedy’s assassination has never had an ‘authorized’ version – or, at least, the closest thing that came to it, the official Warren Report, developed a narrative which was challenged right from the outset by conspiracy theories. Moreoever, Reeve suggests, the assassination-story, which comes to us through a range of contestable and fragmented narrative forms (the Zapruder film, contemporary news reporting, etc.) ‘has itself already done more than any postmodern novel to undermine the supposed authority of historical accounts and objective overviews’ (Reeve, 1999, 138).
The numerous conspiracies surrounding the assassination flourish because there is so much that remains mysterious – despite so much of the event having been recorded on film and audio tape and its aftermath being subject to such intense scrutiny. In a new Introduction to the novel published in 2006 DeLillo notes wryly how the advances in technology in recent years promise to determine whether there were three, four, or even five shots fired (the latter two numbers would make it a conspiracy because the time permitted would only have allowed Oswald to fire three times) (DeLillo, 2006a, viii–ix) but implies that will not cease speculation.
The novel suggests that the mystery reigns not despite the technology of the image but because of it. The very nature of television is that the image seduces the viewer away from any reality it refers to. Partly this is due to the distinctive TV logic Fredric Jameson notes, of replaying and reconstructing events – something which becomes even more pronounced during the news media's response to a crisis (Jameson, 1991, 355). But it is also because of a more fundamental fact, that the image sucks the meaning out of an event and causes us to focus on the image itself.
DeLillo's interest in the figure of Oswald is not just because he is at the heart of what the CIA historian Nicholas Branch thinks of as the ‘seven seconds that broke the back of the American century’ (DeLillo, 2006a, 181) but that he is also a pure creature of the media. Even his name is conferred upon him by the media, as the novel notes. Where he was known simply as Lee Oswald throughout his life, the media insisted upon calling him by his full name, Lee Harvey Oswald, as if to emphasize that he was the double of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
In an interview DeLillo noted that ‘[s]omeone who knew Oswald referred to him as an actor in real life, and I do think there is a sense in which he was watching himself perform’ (DeCurtis, 1994, 51). He is portrayed as someone who takes on different selves according to the situation he finds himself in, and these selves are drawn from various narratives which have influenced him throughout his life: John Wayne movies, Marxist theory, unspecified B-movies. DeLillo suggests this by depicting Oswald's inner voice as switching between clichés drawn from popular culture: ‘My Russian period was over…’, he thinks at one point, and elsewhere he writes in his diary ‘somewhere, a violin plays, as I watch my life whirl away’ (DeLillo, 2006b, 152). Oswald is a man without singular identity – quite unlike the typical autonomous hero of the realist novel. Yet, as Lentricchia suggests, the novel also presents the social backdrop for the presentation of character as utterly different from the world of stable ‘social forces’ which ‘shape as they differentiate the individual’, which was central to realism. These have been replaced by a new climate of the image, whose principal effect is to ‘realign radically all social agents (from top to bottom) as first-person agents of desire seeking self-annihilation and fulfillment in the magical third’ (Lentricchia, 1991, 198). Oswald's aim is thus – to draw on the formulation used by DeLillo in speaking about the novel in interview – to escape the self by ‘merging with history’ (DeCurtis, 1994, 52).
As well as being seduced by the fantasy identities which the media projects DeLillo's Oswald is acutely conscious of constructing his own image in ways that will determine how others see him. When he initially plans to assassinate General Edwin Walker to help Castro he buys a mail-order rifle and poses with the gun in one hand and a radical publication held aloft in the other imagining that the image will appear on the cover of Time or Newsweek after Walker is killed. In the end the photograph is indeed the one which featured in the print and visual news media following the assassination of JFK. As media creation, Oswald undergoes the perfect demise, watching his own murder on a TV monitor: ‘He could see himself shot as the camera caught it. Through the pain he watched TV.…Through the pain, through the losing of sensation except where it hurt, Lee watched himself react to the auguring heat of the bullet’ (DeLillo, 2006a, 439).
The US writer Bret Easton Ellis was associated with the so-called ‘Generation X’ or ‘brat pack’ of writers in the 1980s, along with Dennis Cooper, Douglas Coupland, Jay McInerney, and Tama Janowitz, the children of the ‘baby-boomer’ generation in the decades following the Second World War, writers who present an accurate portrayal of the morally bankrupt, consumerist, celebrity-obsessed culture of late twentieth-century North America. In a different way from J. G. Ballard, the writings of this generation of writers deals head on with the ‘death of affect’ in contemporary society.
Their writing has been termed ‘blank fiction’ by James Annesley, to denote a style of novel where plot and character, the traditional staples of realist fiction, are less important than the impression of a detailed ‘surface’ created by a surfeit of references to pop-cultural ephemera and consumer products. The subject matter of blank fiction deals with the empty lives of disaffected young people in North American cities in a way which eschews the dense plotting and politically weighty stories of earlier American literary novelists such as Morrison, Pynchon, and Mailer in favour of an episodic, ‘glassy’ series of impressions or perspectives of the lives of its characters. Rather than a literary movement or genre, ‘blank fiction’ is a kind of ‘scene’ or shared context reflecting a ‘modern mood’ which ultimately is generated by the effects of late-capitalist commodification.
Ellis's first two novels demonstrated his ability to chronicle the society that surrounded him. Both Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) depict the lives of disaffected students against the backdrop of the consumerist 1980s. They demonstrate the feeling of alienation suffered by wealthy white Americans who indulge in a never-ending superficial lifestyle of drugs, parties and sex. But his most famous – and notorious – novel is 1991's American Psycho, the novel which has been linked most frequently and persuasively to postmodernism.
Ellis's fiction had depicted scenes of sexual violence before (Less Than Zero features a snuff movie and the gang rape of a twelve-year-old tied to a bed), but nothing prepares the reader for this novel. To use the author's own words, American Psycho is ‘a novel about a young, wealthy, alienated Wall Street yuppie named Patrick Bateman who also happened to be a serial killer filled with vast apathy during the height of the Reagan eighties’ (Ellis, 2005, 12). The novel alternates between two kinds of narrative sequence. The first, which takes up most of its pages, details at great length the mundane, inconsequential sequence of lunches, parties, meetings, obscure business deals and discussions about investment banking which constitute Bateman's professional and social life, and is punctuated by long ironic, ‘anti-narrative’ sequences such as going to the drycleaner, the video rental store, the gym, as well as flatly written ‘mini-essays’ on Bateman's favourite bands like Genesis and Huey Lewis and the News. The chapter titles reflect this mundane succession of routine events: ‘Business Meeting’, ‘Yale Club’, ‘Lunch With Bethany’, etc. Throughout these sections the reader is confronted by a mass of references to designer labels and product names, making reading the novel at times like reading catalogues or stocklists.
The second kind of narrative in American Psycho constitutes the only real ‘action’ in the novel and features scenes (away from the office or the restaurant) in which Bateman tortures and kills a series of harmless victims – women whom he has seduced into returning home with him, business associates, a homeless person, a five-year-old boy. His crimes seem generally to be motiveless, his victims apparently selected at random, but he treats them all with extreme sadism and violence, keeping them conscious for as long as possible, and, even though there is no consistency in either type of victim selected or modus operandi, engaging in stock serial killer behaviour such as keeping trophies.
These sections are shocking, and explain why the novel is (after Crash) another of the most notorious succès de scandales in recent decades, frequently charged with being misogynistic (many of Bateman's mutilated victims are women) and pornographic (i.e. dwelling on sexual violence for titilation rather than any literary merit). The novel is still shelved in shrink wrapping in some countries, or prohibited from being sold to those under eighteen. Anticipating scandal, Ellis's original publishers, Simon & Schuster, famously tore up his contract – even forfeiting the advance they had paid him – while the book was reviewed in the New York Times with the headline ‘Don't Buy This Book’, and condemned by the National Organization of Women.
American Psycho is shocking however one interprets it. However, as with all such cases, popular debate has shown a tendency to fall into the naïve trap of assuming the protagonist's tastes and behaviour are the author's own, rather than a satire on a particular kind of person. Of more interest is the fact that the novel presents the reader with two clear challenges (besides stomaching the detailed mutilation and torture).
The first is that it is unclear how real we are intended to see its contents as being. American Psycho's first-person narration gives it a radical undecideability. It is never clear whether the sections in which Bateman tortures and kills have really happened in the world of the story, or whether he is merely fantasizing or perhaps even hallucinating them. No one sees him commit any murders, and there is only one which leads to any suspicion – the one that is closest to having a motive, that of Paul Owen, one of Bateman's colleagues of whom he appears to be envious and whom he butchers with an axe. Owen's disappearance leads a private detective, Donald Kimball, to investigate, interviewing Bateman, but there is never any real suggestion that Bateman will be found out. The novel is without suspense in this regard. One effect of the novel's indeterminacy about the status of events is that the reader comes to experience a similar dissolution of the boundary between ‘reality’ and fiction to that experienced by Bateman.
The second challenge American Psycho poses to readers is how to relate to each other the two apparently quite different kinds of narrative sequence which make up the novel, one banal, trivial and comic, the other horrifying and brutal (though not without moments of the blackest comedy). The answer is surely that the murderous sections are the reactions to, perhaps even the ultimate expressions of the consumerist lifestyle which dictates Bateman's and his associates' existence. In a world where commodification is all, it follows that human beings become interchangeable commodities.
This would explain Bateman's practice of chopping up his victims' bodies and exploring how they work and feel to the touch with a detached fascination. He consumes the bodies of those he tortures and murders, ‘experiencing’ their smells and textures the same way he would with a new product or a meal. Sometimes he eats or burns them. The listing of mutilated body parts in the murder scenes provides an obvious parallel to the relentless description of the clothes he wears or the hi-fi equipment he has bought in the non-murder sections.
In his study of serial killers, referred to earlier, Mark Seltzer sets out to answer the question: what kind of society can produce something as monstrous as the serial killer? His answer is that it is a supremely homogenized one, which lays the emphasis on human types and repetitive forms of production and consumption. The serial killer, Seltzer says, embodies the mass in a single individual (his amassing of victim after victim in similar ‘trademark’ style functioning as an ironic reflection of the culture of mass production). Just like Patrick Bateman, serial killers are always remarked upon as being shockingly ordinary, just like you or I, able to blend into the crowd, with no-one suspecting the depths of depravity which lie beneath their everyday exteriors. Ellis's novel, Seltzer argues, ‘advertises, and trades on, the analogies, or causal relations, between…two forms of compulsive repetition, consumerism and serialized killing’. That is, ‘[t]he question of serial killing cannot be separated from the general forms of seriality, collection, and counting conspicuous in consumer society…, and the forms of fetishism – the collecting of things and representations, persons and person-things like bodies – that traverse it’ (Seltzer, 1998, 64).
Everything Bateman considers of value – the designer labels, the quality restaurants, even the ‘hardbodies’ he admires – seem to be selected because of how he thinks others would regard them. In this respect he is just as much a creature of the hyperreal mediatized culture as DeLillo's Oswald. Bateman tends to film his victims, and choose products or lifestyles because of the influence of advertising. Bateman might be regarded as ‘the postmodern, pop cultural subject carried to its logical conclusion, its apocalyptic apotheosis’ (Blazer, 2002, n.p.) He exists in a world where signifiers float freely, detached from any referent, and consequently he is an extreme demonstration that there is no substance inside the self, simply what it draws from the circulation of signifiers outside, the products and fantasies offered by culture.
The novel might also be considered as an illustration of the dangers of postmodern relativism, where every story or petit récit is as valid as any other, there are no reliable external moral codes and, as Lyotard says, ‘Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong’ (Lyotard, 1984, 76). If there are no values, no norms, then nothing can have any real meaning. An overall logic of equivalence applies in Bateman's shallow world. Genesis equals Drakkar Noir aftershave equals high-performance stereo equipment. But if this is the case then nothing has any value. It is but a short step to good being indistinguishable from evil. Bateman is entirely unable to distinguish between the different kinds of consumption he engages in. At one point he fades out of a conversation with his girlfriend Evelyn, and finds himself:
lost in my own private maze, thinking about other things: warrants, stock offerings, ESOPs, LBOs, IPOs, finances, refinances, debentures, converts, proxy statements, 8-Ks, 10-Qs, zero coupons, PiKs, GNPs, the IMF, hot executive gadgets, billionaires, Kenkichi Nakajima, infinity, Infinity, how fast a luxury car should go, bailouts, junk bonds, whether to cancel my subscription to The Economist, the Christmas Eve when I was fourteen and had raped one of our maids, Inclusivity, envying someone's life, whether someone could survive a fractured skull, waiting in airports, stifling a scream, credit cards and someone's passport and a book of matches from La Côte Basque spattered with blood, surface surface surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a Rolls.
(Ellis, 2004, 331)
This logic of equivalence is paralleled at an aesthetic level in American Psycho by the way that the different sections (murder and lifestyle) of the novel are simply set side by side, one following the other, without framing. The first murder, horrifically described, where Bateman savages a down-and-out with a knife, is followed immediately by a deadpan mini-essay in which he extolls the merits of the band Genesis (it is surely appropriate that all the bands he likes are suitably bland, ‘middle-of-the-road’).
One explanation for the extreme controversy generated by Ellis's book is because, unlike genre fiction, the horrific crimes are not positioned within a clearly defined moral framework which classifies them as evil, and the perpetrator goes unpunished. But its most disturbing feature is the morally bankrupt world in which Bateman's murders take place, which might even produce them. In a world where affect has died, just as J. G. Ballard had predicted, people seek ever more desperate ways of interacting with another person, of experiencing emotion. Bateman is almost entirely unable to feel. He responds to what others say in the way he feels he ought to, as if he is from another planet. Before one lunch meeting, for example, he realizes he is feeling ‘extremely nervous’:
The cause is hard to locate but I’ve narrowed it down to one of two reasons. It's either that I’m afraid of rejection (though I can't understand why: she called me, she wants to see me, she wants to have lunch with me, she wants to fuck me again) or, on the other hand, it could have something to do with this new Italian mousse I’m wearing, which, though it makes my hair look fuller and smells good, feels very sticky and uncomfortable, and it's something I could easily blame my nervousness on.
(Ellis, 2004, 221)
It ought to be apparent by now that Ellis – like Ballard and DeLillo, indeed like any number of postmodern novelists who are mistaken for precisely the opposite – is a moralist. American Psycho is an urgent, heartfelt critique of our affectless culture. Its credentials as such are absolutely clear, in fact. The novel's third epigraph is a couplet from a song by the band Talking Heads (surely, we suspect, much more to Ellis's own taste): ‘And as things fell apart / Nobody paid much attention’. This raises the uncomfortable possibility that the really disturbing element of American Psycho's shocking narrative is not its violence (for, after all, the most extreme violence is graphically displayed constantly in mainstream American popular culture) but the fact that Bateman's activities go unnoticed, never mind undetected by the police.
A repeated source of black comedy in the novel are the episodes in which Bateman apparently comments out loud on his horrific deeds. It may be that these admissions occur only in his head, or they are provocative boasts which prove just what he can get away with. However, the effect is also to remind us that this is a world which does not care, one which is incapable of dealing with shocking eruptions of violent emotion in the midst of all its relentless consumerism. Thus Bateman announces to two of his friends, ‘You know, guys, it's not beyond my capacity to drive a lead pipe repeatedly into a girl's vagina’ (312), tells his colleague Armstrong, ‘And there are many more people I, uh, want to…want to, well, I guess murder’ (137), and coos to a baby ‘Yes I’m a total psychopathic murderer, oh yes I am, I like to kill people, oh yes I do, honey, little sweetie pie, yes I do…’ (212). The recipients of such admissions either ignore the remark or assume he is joking.
Ellis's novel is reminiscent here of Browning's 1836 poem ‘Porphyria's Lover’, in which the psychopathic hero strangles his beloved and complains ‘And yet God has not said a word’, not because he is pleased not to be punished but because the absence of judgement disturbs him. This logic in fact suggests the significance of the first of American Psycho's three epigraphs. It comes from another nineteenth-century text, Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Notes from Underground, published in 1864. Despite the gulf in history and style, there are obvious similarities in that both novels are first-person narratives by disaffected, alienated city-dwellers. The emblematic nature of each protagonist, the Underground Man and the American Psycho, is suggested by the particular passage Ellis uses for the epigraph. It comes not from Dostoevsky's novel itself but from its preface: ‘Both the author of these Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional. Nevertheless, such persons as the composer of these Notes not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, considering the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.’ The quotation goes on to note that its hero ‘represents a generation that is still living out its days amongst us’ and that his narrative is able to ‘clarify the reasons why he appeared and was bound to appear in our midst.’ Ellis's choice of epigraph signals clearly the sociological intention behind the book: to suggest that a character like Patrick Bateman is the ultimate product of a superficial, uncaring age, in which the logic of consumerism runs rampant.
But the more specific parallel between American Psycho and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground also points to another way of reading the novel. Like Notes from Underground the book is a confession, though it is easy to miss this. But why else would Bateman be narrating? He even confesses directly on two occasions. Towards the end of the novel he tells Evelyn: ‘My…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’. But she ‘misses the essence of what I’m saying’ (Ellis, 2004, 325). Soon after he erupts into an even more direct and explicit confession of his guilt to his associate Harold Carnes: ‘You don't seem to understand. You’re not really comprehending any of this. I killed him. I did it, Carnes. I chopped Owen's fucking head off. I tortured dozens of girls. That whole message I left on your machine was true’ (Ellis, 2004, 373). At first Carnes ignores him, then thinks it's an unfunny joke, then does not believe him as he is convinced he was with Owen himself a few days before and Owen is therefore still alive.
This is a novel which parallels the modernist confessional form, typified by Notes from Underground, but in this case is actually about the impossibility of confessing. As a result it puts the onus on the reader to heed what he is saying. There is a subtle metafictional dimension to American Psycho which confirms that it requires its reader to be active. The first line of the novel is: ‘ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First’ (Ellis, 2004, 4). At the most obvious level this refers to a piece of graffiti, but the quotation is from Dante's Inferno and relates to the inscription on the gates of Hell. With a sense of circularity, the novel ends with Bateman hearing someone ask ‘Why?’ and explaining out loud (though of course no-one in the world of the novel is listening):
‘this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh…’ and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes’ color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.
(Ellis, 2004, 384)
While both opening and closing lines are obviously signs written on the wall, at a symbolic level they are clearly suggesting that the writing (on the wall) ought to convey a message to the reader of American Psycho: what the book presents us with is a vision of contemporary Hell, one moreover from which it is impossible to escape. As with Libra, while the title of the novel most obviously is a label for its central character, an American ‘psycho’(path), it could also of course be read adjectivally, in the way one does with ‘American Gothic’. ‘American psycho’ may be an alternative term for postmodernity.
To take heed of what Bateman says in the last passage of the novel, American Psycho is indeed a depiction of ‘how life presents itself…at the end of the century’. Both the first and last words of the novel are metafictional directions to the reader. Unlike the metafiction of an earlier generation of American novelist, such as Barth or Coover, they do not imply that fiction can no longer have a referential function, but instead collapse the distinction between world and book. When we close the book we exist in a world which is essentially a more tempered version of the homogenous, commodified, affectless world of American Psycho. The ending is not an exit because we cannot get outside of the book: the book is the world.