Sensation, Perception, Mediation2012 Szeged

László B. Sári:Transgression & Intermediality in Contemporary American Minimalist Fiction

(McGurl 2009, 301)

„ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE IS SCRAWLED IN BLOOD” - American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis's controversial novel of 1991, opens with this image of words (the quote is from Dante's Inferno) written in blood. For a novel notorious for extensive descriptions of racism, sexism, rape, torture, murder, mutilation and cannibalism this image is especially apt. But as the reader's eyes move to the second line of the text, „red letters on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner”, this blood is revealed as a literal and literary trompe l'oeil: the words are written in blood-red letters, not actual blood. This split-section confusion, too, is apt, as the extent to which much of the violence in the novel actually happens or is merely hallucinated is never entirely clear. In this moment - significant enough to merit translation into Mary Harron's film adaptation of American Psycho (2000), where the ominous red drops of the opening credits resolve into raspberry sauce - the literal constitution of the blood in which the opening tetxt seems to be 'scrawled' forces us to consider the distinction between fact and fiction, literal and literary, the world and how it is represented in art. Further, it forces us to question how violence, that notoriously elusive entity, informs these distinctions and our relations to them. (Mandel 2006, 9)

You're a projectionist and you're tired and angry, but mostly you're bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie.This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there's a flash of an erection.

Tyler does this.A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second.

Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That's how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it. (Palahniuk 2007, 29-30)

One of the major mistakes people make is that they think manners are only the expression of happy ideas. There's a whole range of behavior that can be expressed in a mannerly way. That's what civilization is all about – doing it in a mannerly and not an antagonistic way. One of the places we went wrong was the naturalistic Rousseauean movement of the Sixties in which people said, „Why can't you say what's on your mind?” In civilization there have to be some restraints. If we followed every implse, we'd be killing one another.

Miss Manners (Judith Martin)

The album [Huey Lewis and the News: Small World] ends with „Slammin',” which has no words and it's just a lot of horns that quite frankly, if you turn it up really loud, can give you a fucking big headache and maybe even make you feel a little sick, though it might sound different on an album or on a cassette though I wouldn't know anything about that. Anyway it set off something wicked in me that lasted for days. And you cannot dance to it very well.

(Ellis 1991, 359)

...and racing blindly down Greenwich I lose control entirely, the cab swerves into a Korean deli, next to a karaoke restaurant called Lotus Blossoms I've been with Japanese clients, the cab rolling over fruit stands, smashing through walls of glass, the body of a cashier thudding across the hood, Patrick tries to put the cab in reverse but nothing happens, he staggers out of the cab, leaning against it, a nerve-racking silence follows […] Patrick dashing across the street toward the light of his new office, when he walks in...

...nodding toward Gus, our night watchman, sining in, heading up in the elevator, higher, toward the darkness of his floor, calm is eventually restored, safe in the anonymity of my new office, able with shaking hands to pick up the cordless phone, looking through my Rolodex, exhausted, eyes falling upon Harold Carnes' number, dialing the seven digits slowly, breating deeply, evenly, I decide to make public what has been, until now, my private dementia...

(Ellis 1991, 349-52)

YOU ARE NOT YOUR EGO(Douglas Copland: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture)

...you're not how much money you have in the bank.

You're not your job.

You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself.

You're not your problems.

You're not your name.

You're not your age.

You're not your hopes.

The bullet out of Tyler's gun, it tore out my cheek to give me a jagged smile from ear to ear. Yeah, just like an angry Halloween pupkin. Japanese demon. Dragon of Avarice.

(Palahniuk 2007, 207)

- scandal as (a way to) success, often by way of a detour into the non-literary realm

"In a move similar to that of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse, which transcribes the pornographic passages that it then denounces, NOW's hotline phone message included a recording - in a woman's voice - of one of the passages of rape and dismemberment from American Psycho (as the New Republic put it, "the phone number is sure to fall into the wrong lonely hands").

NOW seems to acknowledge the citationality of the novel's violence, though not its own, when it follows the recording with a statement that crimes of rape and violence against women are epidemic and on the rise. The hotline tape concludes by calling for a boycott. "'We are not telling them not to publish,"' says Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles Chapter, in an interview with the New York Times; rather, NOW hopes the publisher "will learn [that] violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable" [see McDowell]. One might be tempted to ridicule this exercise first for the patent falsity of the statement that somehow violence against women is not socially acceptable, and second for refusing the possibility that, just as its own gesture of citation is not to be construed as a misogynist act of violence, so too perhaps the passage quoted may bear a complicated-and willfully citational-relation to the violence it depicts. But it is worth noting that NOW's response is not atypical of public culture's responses to popular cultural artifacts: representation is construed as advocacy, and figuration is construed as performativity. Furthermore, the emotionald enunciations uttered in horror and disgust, inevitably cite - obsessively and in detail - the target of their denunciation, thus betraying the perverse or pornographic investments of the censors themselves." (Freccero 1997, 50)

Palahniuk's literary output before 9/11

Fight Club (1997)Survivor (1999)Invisible Monsters (1999)Choke (2001)

and after...

Lullaby (2002, horror)Diary (2003, Künstlerroman)Haunted (2005, horror story collection)Rant (2007, time-travel sci-fi)Snuff (2008, ?)Pygmy (2009, YA fiction)Tell-All (2010, celebrity biography)Damned (2011, satire)Invisible Monsters REMIX (2012, a new edition with deleted scenes)

Ellis's literary output before 9/11

Less than Zero (1985)Rules of Attraction (1987)American Psycho (1991)The Informers (1996)Glamorama (1999)

...and after

Lunar Park (2006, horror-celebrity author biography)Imperial Bedrooms (2010, sequel to Less than Zero)

Lunar Park clearly wants to blur the boundary between truth and fiction, a point made clear on the novelist's website at Random House. The site offers readers two versions of Bret Easton Ellis, illustrated by headshot of the author split by a jagged line. The page has two columns; each provides biographical facts about and an interview with 'Bret Easton Ellis.' One coloumn matches the facts of Ellis's life and one matches the information in Lunar Park. Both were born on March 7, 1964, and both are 6' tall. But one Ellis is 185 pounds and graduated from Bennington College in 1986, and one is 220 pounds and graduated from Camden College in 1986. The interviews, each of which purports to be an interview with Bret Easton Ellis, confuse matters further. In one, Ellis says „It's up to the reader to decide how much of Lunar Park actually occured.” In the other, he says „It's up to each reader to take a leap of faith and understand that everything in Lunar Park actually occured.”

(Karnicky 2011, 118-9)

"They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. [...] because the writer resented that she [Blair] had returned to me [Clay, the narrator] I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love and kindness. [...] He [the "author"] was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all. [...] The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. [...] In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn't disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. [...] The audience - the book's actual cast - quickly realized what had happenned. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was becasue there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. [...] in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.)" (Ellis 2010)

When they [eyewinesses] saw the body they thought the „thing” lying by a trash bin was – and I'm quoting the first Los Angeles Times article on the front page of the California section about the Julian Wells murder – „a flag.” I had to stop when I hit that word and start reading the article from the beginning. The students who found Julien thought this because Julien was wearing a white Tom Ford suit […] and their immediate reaction seemed halfway logical since the jacket and the pants were streaked with red. […] But if they thought it was a „flag” my immediate question was: then where was the blue? If the body resembled a flag, I kept wondering, then where was the blue? And then I realized: it was his head.

(Ellis 2011)

But then I should have realized this sooner because, in my own way, I had put Julian there, and I'd seen what had happened to him in another – and very different – movie.

(Ellis 2011)

Thanks for your attention...