This paper deals with the novel American Psycho by the American author Bret Easton Ellis and his place amongst other writers of the “blank generation”. The term “blank generation fiction” will be defined by citing those literary critics who extensively examined this trend, namely Elizabeth Young, Graham Caveney and James Annesley.
Based on their work it will be shown how violence in blank generation fiction has not to be taken literally but can adopt symbolic meaning. Furthermore we shall see in an anlysis of American Psycho how this symbolic meaning develops in this novel in direct relation to the vast consumerism and the hyperreal quality of life in the 1980s. It will be closely examined how the seemingly unmotivated murderous behaviour of the novel´s main protagonist can be interpreted as a direct, logical, if exaggerated result of mass culture and the principles of the free market.
Finally it will be examined how Ellis integrates chapters written in the style of music journalism into his novel to stress both the fragmentation of the main protagonist´s mind by the media and the perversity of the consumer who can easily switch from witnessing an act of extreme violence to unworriedly reflecting on something like music, another mass cultural phenomenon.
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Violence and Blank Generation Fiction
3. Violence in American Psycho
3.1 Violence and Consumerism
3.2 Violence and Hyperrealism
3.3 Violence and the Function of Music Journalism
4. Conclusion
5. Bibliography
1. Introduction
This paper deals with the novel American Psycho by the American author Bret Easton Ellis and his place amongst other writers of the “blank generation”. The term “blank generation fiction” will be defined by citing those literary critics who extensively examined this trend, namely Elizabeth Young, Graham Caveney and James Annesley.
Based on their work it will be shown how violence in blank generation fiction has not to be taken literally but can adopt symbolic meaning. Furthermore we shall see in an anlysis of American Psycho how this symbolic meaning develops in this novel in direct relation to the vast consumerism and the hyperreal quality of life in the 1980s. It will be closely examined how the seemingly unmotivated murderous behaviour of the novel´s main protagonist can be interpreted as a direct, logical, if exaggerated result of mass culture and the principles of the free market.
Finally it will be examined how Ellis integrates chapters written in the style of music journalism into his novel to stress both the fragmentation of the main protagonist´s mind by the media and the perversity of the consumer who can easily switch from witnessing an act of extreme violence to unworriedly reflecting on something like music, another mass cultural phenomenon.
2. Violence and Blank Generation Fiction
In the mid 1980s, with the emergence of the “brat-pack”, a group of young authors consisting of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerny and Tama Janowitz, a new literary trend was born which was labeled with terms as various as “fiction of insurgency”, “new narrative” “downtown writing”, “punk fiction”, and finally now is commonly referred to as “blank fiction” or “blank generation fiction”. The latter is how Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney called it following Richard Hell´s punk rock song “Blank Generation”, because the writers have been influenced by “the punk ethos of getting out there and doing something” (Young and Caveney, Introduction). All these labels try to unite literature which is urban in focus, i.e. mainly restricted to life in New York, and is concerned with the role of the young American individual within a consumer culture. Authors of the blank generation prefer flat, affectless and atonal prose to explore topics like “violence, indulgence, sexual excess, decadence, consumerism and commerce” (Annesley 1), and their novels feature flat, undeveloped characters. Coming directly from within the 80s consumer culture, their works effortlessly incorporate its plain, commodified language and combine a broad range of mass cultural references from advertisement, cinema, music and television, constantly alluding to “products, personalities and places of the decade” (Annesley 6). Elizabeth Young believes that “their entire lives have been lived out within a milieu wherein art and pop music, advertising, films and fiction have always been inextricably intertwined, inseperable one from the other” (14). Mass cultural references (e.g. brand names, retail outlets) are used to uncover the madness of the consumer culture, where everything has become commodified, and the insane media overload the people living in this culture have to suffer. Being heavily influenced by the mass culture they write about, their anti-academic approach seems well suited to tackle the predominant subjects violence, consumer frenzy, sexual experimentation and urban despair in the New York of the 1980s, thus delivering a critique out of the inside. Of our main interest here shall be the topic of violence which, though, in order to interpret those works properly, has to be examined in its close relation to the other elements.
Critics who condemn works of “blank generation fiction” because of their frequent depiction of extreme violence, more often than not misinterpret its function: Either they dismiss it as pure sensationalism or as sadism on part of the author. The latter would mean that those books depicted violence to be enjoyed. In this respect Paul Crowther states:
The violent work is found pleasurable because it reflects, and thereby consolidates, male fantasies of virility, power, and control. It feeds, in other words, upon socially negative attitudes – especially towards women – which are deeply embedded in patriarchal ideology. (Crowther 97)
Though one might argue if this is true in some cases, for example when watching a horror movie, this kind of sadism certainly is nothing Ellis or McInerny can be accused of. If at all, Crowther´s description might explain some of the behaviour of the characters portrayed in their works: For violence cannot only be integrated into a fictional work for the sake of sheer fascination with horror, but violence in literature can also adopt complex symbolic functions (cf. Annesley 12):
Violence in these novels is not read in direct relation to violence in American society, but considered in abstract terms and taken as a metaphor for the deadening impact of commercialisation in the late twentieth century. (Annesley 37)
That means that the violence in these novels is not to be interpreted literally, is not supposed to be a representation of real violence but rather to be regarded as a means of showing where a culture that is more and more reliant on the principles of the commodity and the free market might ultimately lead to. So these works “employ images of the brutalised body to develop a wider perspective on dehumanisation, objectification and reification” (Annesley 37).
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