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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 275-282 Postmodern Gothic and The violent and abjectal writings of Bret Easton Ellis have not been properly understood up till now. His novels have variously been read as chauvinist and sadist glorifications of violence (primarily by feminist critics who especially slashed American Psycho at the time of publication in 1990), or as shallow, or ‘blank’ urban fictions depicting soulless, fetishist consumers (Caveney & Young in 1992 and James Annesley in 1998 have foregrounded Ellis’ critique of consumerism), but relatively little attention has been devoted to how Ellis inscribes himself in an American Gothic tradition (see Helyer, 2000, and Punter & Byron, 2004, as exceptions). Ellis’ use of Gothic narrative features to create an atmosphere of tension and unease, and playful intertextual references to create humour, in fact invites a reading of Ellis as a satirist or parodist, which opens up for a healthy, and amazingly often overlooked, differentiation between author/narrator and characters. While Ellis – not least because of his public persona – is no doubt imbricated in the commodification and reification of human relations he describes in his fictions, one must also grant him an implied author position from which he critiques his own Zeitgeist. Ultimately Ellis is a puritan, using Juvenalian and Menippean satire[1] to lampoon violence, fetishism and consumerism. While this authorial distance can be detected in all his works from the debut novel Less than Zero (1985) to Glamorama (1998), this paper focuses particularly on one item in Ellis’ most maligned and least analysed publication, the 1994 suite of short stories, The Informers. It is symptomatic that the original Alfred Knopf hardcover edition of The Informers devotes all its back cover blurb space to praise – not of the present volume, as one might have expected – but of American Psycho. It is clear that the publishers are still trying to spin-doctor the reception of that novel away from both the vicious feminist indictment of the book’s violence, and the other main negative criticism, which focused on the book’s almost mind-numbing use of repetition and redundancy (see Freccero, 1997 for a thorough discussion of these issues). Two of these blurbs directly situate that novel in the satirical register, and obviously this [end page 275] leads one to read The Informers in a similar light. The inside flap text encourages the reader to read the collection as a chronicle of a recent American past, and suggests that the book be read as a moral indictment of that period, its actors and their mores, which I suggested above to be emblematic of Ellis’s author position. Finally, the collection is presented as one which “unmasks both a city [L.A.] and an age” (Ellis, 1994; flap text). This is an indication that Ellis’s subtle construction of the satire has not been explicit enough to guarantee his reception, and the publishers are forced to intervene. In order to salvage Ellis’ faltering career his publishers, in other words, still attempt to offer correctives to the popular reception of Ellis as one with his characters and their worldview, and they try hard to sell him as a moralist and critic of the Zeitgeist. In the following I will show how right this assessment was. Zooming in on one particular story, “The Secrets of Summer,” to show how the Gothic atmosphere is constructed and undercut by Ellis, through the use of parodic techniques, I will eventually situate this story in comparison with other Gothic examples of Juvenalian and Menippean satire, such as Matthew Lewis’ porno-gothic, The Monk. First, though, I present an analysis of Gothic manifestations and intertextualities in the story itself. The Gothic construction in “The Secrets of Summer” hinges on the postulated presence of a vampire underworld in Los Angeles in the 1980s, an underworld actually overlapping the yuppie jet set in that same city. The vampiric community is described as a set of friends and acquaintances who happen to be vampires and have to structure their lives around their vampiric needs, but otherwise are not greatly different from other Angelinos. Their victims in fact often mistake this invisible subgroup for other types of power brokers, such as theatrical agents, and its members are therefore desirable to many possible victims/clients in the city. This sets up alignments that are ripe for satire, since issues of taste and consumer savvy can easily be derided, once we accept that yuppies are depicted as hollow vampires, constantly seeking human contact to fill the void inside them. The vampire narrator of the story is for instance oblivious to the incongruencies in his preoccupation with setting (lighting “candles I bought at the Pottery Barn last night” [177]) and the deed of raping, beating up and bleeding a young girl he has picked up at a night-club. A further alignment of a political nature foregrounds the satire even more, since the vampires all appear to be Republicans, attending George Bush fundraisers (178), enjoying nothing more than telling “Ethiopian jokes” (176, 181, 185, 188) or using racial invectives such as “nigger” (176, 181). Ellis is evidently laying it on a bit thick, in case anyone should miss the political satire here, but this practice is historically aligned with [end page 276] the Juvenalian satirical mode, employing the strategies of distortion and exaggeration (hyperbole, or amplificatio, cf. Baines 2001). One definition of Juvenalian satire in fact also highlights a “xenophobic” tone as characteristic of this subtype[2], and continues to characterize the Juvenalian satirical speaker as one who stands away from his objects of criticism, and never including autobiographical references. All these features are pertinent as characteristics of Ellis’ text. The exploration of the ins and outs of the vampire subgroup lets Ellis expose the general economy of services (usually of a sexual nature) that rules the night world of L.A. of the 1980s. This technique of exposure by “highlighting the gap between appearance and reality” is another hallmark of Juvenalian satire, as for instance practised in English literature by Swift and Pope (Baines, 2001). Lastly, it could be argued that the setting up of Gothic intertexts, which are then parodied in Ellis’s story, is also in itself a part of the Juvenalian strategies, alignable with Freund’s notion of the instrumental parody: “a use of quotation and allusion, which does not work against a literary model, but casts it as a structural foil” (see Victoria Baines’ review of Christine Schmitz’ Das Satirische in Juvenals Satiren in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2001.08.29, for this point regarding the poetics of Juvenalian satire). So far we have demonstrated the presence of Juvenalian satire in the Ellis’s story, but the story’s prose form itself, of course, invites us to test the story for Menippean satire strategies as well. This was Bakhtin’s chosen satirical form, because of its inherent polyphony and dialogistic use of voices. The Menippean form is carnivalistic and chaotic, and although Ellis’s story as such is relatively neat in its structure, chaos wins out in its climactic scene where the vampire turns the tables on his psychiatrist, interrogating him in quite cryptic terms, until the psychiatrist breaks down in sobs: “‘Where is the place you feel safest?’ I ask. ‘In an empty movie theatre,’ Dr. Nova says. ‘What’s your favorite movie?’ I ask. ‘Vacation with Chevy Chase and Christie Brinkley.’ ‘What’s your favorite cereal?’ ‘Frosted Mini Wheats or something with bran in it.’ ‘What’s your favorite TV commercial for?’ ‘Bayer Aspirin.’ ‘Who did you vote for last election?’ ‘Reagan.’ ‘Define the vanishing point.’ ‘You’ – he’s crying – ‘define it.’ ‘We’ve already been there,’ I tell him. ‘We’ve already seen it.’ “Who’s… we?’ He chokes. ‘Legion’” (194-5). At that point the reader feels displaced into a chaotic netherworld of paranoia, typical of both Menippean narratives and much postmodern American literature (Pynchon, Burroughs, etc.). The deadening triviality of the vampire’s first many questions is shattered by the focus on “the vanishing point” in his last question. Dr. Nova, like many other Ellis’s characters seem to have a particular weak point regarding the issue of vanishing (“Disappear here” is [end page 277] a mantra used throughout Ellis first novel Less Than Zero), and he breaks down when the vampire, speaking in the first person plural, reveals that he has already been there, at the end of all things. This apocalyptic tone is of course also part of the Gothic register, as we shall see later. Ellis’s story excels in naturalising the unusual practices of the vampires in a mock-Gothic tone: “I go to the other room, swallow some Valium, open up my coffin and take a little nap. I wake up later […] grateful for the new customized coffin. […] FM radio, tape cassette, digital alarm clock, Perry Ellis sheets, phone small color TV with built-in VCR and cable (MTV, HBO)” (182). The paraphernalia of the vampire life is described as casually as the brand name listings in American Psycho bracket Bateman’s act of murder and torture. The difference between the two texts is the explicit humour of the tone of “The Secrets of Summer,” which is rarely detectable in American Psycho’s subtler satire. Mitchell’s points about the fetishism of the Menippean satire’s focus on sexuality and body fluids is something which is illustrated by grotesque quotes such as “Semen and blood is a delightful combo” (180), or “[W]e first buy two large raw steaks at Westward Ho and eat them in the front row and I flirt with a couple of sorority girls […] meat hanging from my mouth” (180). Descriptions of much more explicit and extended rape scenes/bloodlettings could also be cited as evidence in this connection, but snippets such as “the mattress below us sopping wet with her blood” (177) will suffice to make the point. Also pertinent to “The Secrets of Summer” are some other features of Menippean satire, underscored by Knight (2003): “It is free (from history, realism and legend) and hence fantastic.” “Its fantasies create extraordinary situations for the purpose of testing philosophical truth, especially through the manipulation of perspective.” “It often represents unusual states of insanity, split personality, dream, excessive passion, creating [what Bakhtin calls a] ‘dialogic relationship to one’s self’.” “Scandals, eccentricities, inappropriate speech, violations of politeness and social expectations are very characteristic.” All these items sound like they were drawn from a poetics of the Gothic novel, especially the insistence on the unreliable, fluctuating mental states of characters and narrators. The elements pursuant to impropriety of speech of course completely overlap the Juvenalian elements discussed above, so here I will focus on perhaps less obvious correlations to Knight’s points. The “philosophical truth” tested in Ellis’s story may seem hidden to the casual reader, but is revealed once one realises that the moral of the story is that even vampires have anxieties and apocalyptic fears. The vampire community is also being stalked, by killers with stakes “slathered with Lawry’s garlic powder” (186), and the protagonist suffers from “Visions of [end page 278] nuclear missiles blowing this place away” (192). He freaks out when one of the victims – a 14-year old – turns out to know more Ethiopian jokes than he does, and when he realises that she really is completely unafraid of him (her only comment when she sees his vampire mouth is “Just don’t give me a hickey” [191]), he has no other recourse than to “scream and jump on her and rip her throat out” (191). These and other alarming symptoms of the impending end for the vampires are signals of Ellis’s intention with the Menippean satire: to caution that civilization is in peril when even vampires are shocked by the decline in mores among our children. As indicated above, Ellis uses the Gothic tradition as springboard for parody, while at the same time utilising Gothic stock features and conventions to enhance the atmosphere of his own story. This duality creates an oscillation between shudder and laughter, which is redolent of the postmodern Gothic of meta-horror films and other meta-fictional Gothic phenomena (cf. the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Two literary figures can be defined as authors of Ellis’s most obvious intertexts within the Gothic tradition: “Monk” Lewis and Edgar Allan Poe. The tradition for satire in connection with the Gothic is nowhere more obvious than in the Juvenalian/Menippean practices of Matthew Lewis, who in his The Monk, ‘writes back’ to Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (see Blakemore, 1998) and parodies by making explicit all the sexual horror running as a subtext in the foundational Gothic novels such as Radcliffe’s. According to Ann Campbell’s Bakhtinian analysis of The Monk (1997): “Satire permeates the novel, obtruding into even the most gruesome scenes,” a quote that could easily be applied to Ellis’s short story or indeed his whole oeuvre. I would also argue that her view of the function of the satire in Lewis is transferable to Ellis: “As a satirist it is Lewis’s responsibility to expose whatever he finds beneath any deceptive exterior. The most vicious discoveries are supposed to act as purgatives for his readers: harsh but salutary” (Campbell, 1997). The fact that Ellis exposes the apocalyptic fears of everybody, even the vampires among us, and shows them as hollow and ultimately powerless to react other than through violence to the soullessness of today’s youth, is exactly something he presents to his readers as a cautionary vision of how our society is (d)evolving. That Ellis’s readers resist such “purgatives” is hardly surprising, and certainly not much different from Lewis’s readers’ sensationalist, yet morally outraged reactions. The specific American Gothic intertext of “The Secrets of Summer” is the work of Edgar Allan Poe, which is parodied in the segments of the story dealing with the fears of the vampire community, and their wish to repress what might happen to them if they transgress too openly against the yuppie norms they use as their cover. (This is of course parallel to [end page 279] Patrick Bateman’s strategy of invisibility in American Psycho.) A vampire has been killed in a fashion hardly less gruesome than that the vampires themselves apply to their victims, and his name is rarely spoken among the circle of friends and associates. However, it slips out that the vampire in question was “Roderick,” a name which instantly evokes one of Poe’s best-known protagonists, Roderick Usher from the tale “The Fall of the House of Usher.” While Poe’s Roderick is not overtly vampiric, he is certainly an archetype of the Gothic character type: hypersensitive, a creature of the night, an aesthete, and a bodily monstrosity in that his fate is intimately linked, not only to his emaciated sister, Madeline, but to the vary building “The House” of which he is Master. Other echoes of Poe occur in Ellis’s story when he invokes the other gestalt which everyone associates with Poe, the Raven: “Looming over you like a fucking raven. Picture the biggest raven you’ve ever seen. Picture it looming” (193). Ellis’s raven is similar to Poe’s in its role as harbinger of evil and an omen of the eternal restlessness it condemns its interlocutor to. It further underscores the vampire’s paradoxical humanity, as the raven haunting Poe’s persona now haunts and punishes the evil, yet fearful vampire. Thus the twin strategies of Juvenalian and Menippean satire: a biting (no vampire pun intended), bitter, and savage railing against the corruption of contemporary mores from a quasi-aristocratic point of view, and Gothic parody (of texts from both the British and the American Gothic traditions) are intertwined in Ellis’s story, rendering it an indictment of the same postmodern period (see D’haen, 1995, for an early statement of the existence of the Gothic within the postmodern, and Blazer, 2002, for an attempt at defining the postmodern through Ellis’s work) it partakes of in its style and themes, chief among which are the commodification of all human relations. Punter & Byron are thus, perhaps, too cautious when they state about Ellis: “Maybe, then, what Ellis is recapitulating is at least partly the Gothic anxiety about the draining of subjectivity, about the ways in which people can become monstrous” (Punter & Byron, 2004: 116). Rather, Ellis flaunts the draining effect of capitalism and articulates the anxiety through vicious satire and blatant parody of some Gothic genre conventions and foundational texts. [end page 280]
[1]. “There are two main branches of satire: formal and informal. The two formal types are Horatian and Juvenalian; they share the verse form and the first person perspective. [Traditionally the formal satires were in verse, but nineteenth- and twentieth-century satires are predominantly in prose, regardless of their sub-type. BS.] Juvenalian satire is the harsher form […] with contempt and moral indignation at the corruption and evil of humans or institutions. The other type of satire is the informal, often called the […] Menippean. This type is not verse but prose and speaks in the third not first person” (Saxon, 1996). “Menippean: A chaotic, often formless satire that satirizes the structure of the world as well as its subject matter. It tends to mix genres, collapse categories, and intentionally ridicule everything. Its exact target is often hard to locate because it seems to attack everything, and it often includes a preoccupation with sexual misfunctions and bodily fluids” (Mitchell 2004). [2]. “Juvenalian satire adopts a rather urgent, angry, extremely abusive and harsh tone filled with invective and vivid images of social and moral criticism. It also tends toward the xenophobic, making ample use of caricatures and stereotyping” (Evans et al., 1995).
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