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I came away from his room without even the satisfaction of having offered him an outlet which might have relieved his heart a little. And now I can open the window and lean out to gaze at the sky, while he in the other room wrings his hands and weeps, devoured by rage and grief. If I went back now, into his room, and said to him joyfully; "I say, Signor Nuti, there are still the stars! You of course have forgotten them, but they are still there!" what would happen? To how many men, caught in the throes of a passion, or bowed down, crushed by sorrow, by hardship, would it do good to think that there, above the roof, is the sky, and that in the sky there are the stars. Even if the fact of the stars' being there did not inspire in them any religious consolation. As we gaze at them, our own feeble pettiness is engulfed, vanishes in the emptiness of space, and every reason for our torment must seem to us meagre and vain. But we must have in ourselves, in the moment of passion, the capacity to think of the stars. This may be found in a man like myself, who for some time past has looked at everything, himself included, from a distance. If I were to go in there and tell Signor Nuti that the stars were shining in the sky, he would perhaps shout back at me to give them his kind regards, and would turn me out of the room like a dog.
In vain do we detach ourselves from the outburst of a soul which from its profoundest depths hurls forth, broken and disordered, the most recondite thoughts, never yet confessed to itself even, its most serious and awful feelings, the strangest sensations which strip things of every familiar meaning, to give them at once another, unexpected meaning, with a truth that springs forth and imposes itself, disconcerting and terrifying. The terror is due to our recognition, with an appalling clarity, that madness dwells and lurks within each of us and that a mere trifle may let it loose: release it for a moment from the elastic web of present consciousness, and lo, all the imaginings accumulated in years past and now wandering unconnected; the fragments of a life that has remained hidden, because we could not or would not let it be reflected in ourselves by the light of reason; dubious actions, shameful falsehoods, dark hatreds, crimes meditated in the shadow of our inward selves and planned to the last detail, and forgotten memories and unconfessed desires burst in tumultuous, with diabolical fury, roaring like wild beasts. On more than one occasion, we all looked at one another with madness in our eyes, the terror of the spectacle of that madman being sufficient to release in us too for a moment the elastic net of consciousness. And even now we eye askance, and go up and touch with a sense of misgiving some object in the room which was for a moment illumined with the sinister light of a new and terrible meaning by the sick man's hallucinations; and, going to our own rooms, observe with stupefaction and repugnance that... yes, positively, we too have been overborne by that madness, even at a distance, even when alone: we find here and there clear signs of it, pieces of furniture, all sorts of things, strangely out of place.
In the train, I felt as though I were rushing towards madness, through the night. In what world was I? My travelling companion, a man of middle age, dark, with oval eyes, like discs of enamel, and hair that gleamed with oil, he belonged certainly to this world; firm and well established in the consciousness of his own calm and well cared for beastliness, he understood it all to perfection, without worrying about anything; he knew quite well all that it concerned him to know, where he was going, why he was travelling, the house at which he would arrive, the supper that was being prepared for him. But I? Was I of the same world? His journey and mine... his night and mine.... No, I had no time, no world, no anything. The train was his; he was travelling in it. How on earth did I come to be travelling in it also? What was I doing in the world in which he lived? How, in what respect was this night mine, when I had no means of living it, nothing to do with it? He had his night and all the time he wanted, that middle-aged man who was now twisting his neck about with signs of discomfort in his immaculate starched collar. No, no world, no time, nothing: I stood apart from everything, absent from myself and from life; and no longer knew where I was nor why I was there. Images I carried in me, not my own, of things and people; images, aspects, faces, memories of people and things which had never existed in reality, outside me, in the world which that gentleman saw round him and could touch. I had thought that I saw them, and could touch them also, but no, they were all imagination! I had never found them again, because they had never existed: phantoms, a dream.... But how could they have entered my mind? From where? Why? Was I there too, perhaps, then? Was there an I there then that now no longer existed? No; the middle-aged gentleman opposite to me told me, no: that other people existed, each in his own way and with his own space and time: I, no, I was not there; albeit, not being there, I should have found it hard to say where I really was and what I was, being thus without time or space.
In Europe, the dead go on shaping life, crushing it with a weight of history, tradition, and custom. The stability of old forms obstructs, hinders, or arrests all vital motion. In America, to the contrary, life belongs to the living. Still, whereas life means constant motion, it must compose itself in forms. Because the two conditions are opposed, life is neither perpetual motion nor eternal consistency. Just consider: if life were in perpetual flux it would lack all consistency, while if it remained eternally consistent, it would be motionless.
Whereas life in Europe suffers from the stability of its old forms, perhaps life in America suffers from an excessive mobility that prevents enduring forms. As a result, in response to an American gentleman who boasted to me, "We have no past, we thrust ourselves completely into the future!" I was able to say, "One sees, dear sir, that you rush to make yourselves a past. [...]
cool. bombastic
(neil feels this about the non-tech world?)
[...] Although Andy Warhol was personally more or less unequivocally loving about consumer culture his art-works were understood by the critical establishment to be seriously ironic and indeed they had that cutting edge to them. Some of the writing we are considering is closer in attitude to he work of Jeff Koons, whose detailed large-scale simulations of kitsch objects and totemic entertainment figures are both iconic and laudatory. Koons entirely lacks the "distancing" effect of Warhol's work, that cool space where a range of quasi-ironic reaction is expected. He has frequently been accused of having himself been blandly "consumed" by the consumer artefacts he portrays. It really is a question of distance. When one exists completely within a culture, as do the younger writers we are studying who have no memory of the certainties nad judgements of hte pre-sixties world, even though that culture may be a self-conscious and "ironic" one itself in many ways (look at advertising), it is impossible to sustain ironic comment about that culture as if one were writing from without it. [...]
[...] Ellis's characters do not even exist as archetypes -- we are sometimes given the sense that they do have individual qualities but that these are so spurious, negligible and second-hand as to be not worth mentioning. This is in itself ironic as contemporary America promises personality and personal liberation to individuals as part of the cornucopia of consumer choice. They are encouraged to spend their lives lovingly dissecting and nurturing their precious pysches in a ferment of personal growth, therapy, self-help, counselling, hypnotism, channelling, re-birth and a million other expensive forms of charlatanism, until they emerge, shrink-wrapped, into exactly the sort of worthless, uniform mediocrity that Ellis is citing. All in all, Ellis's disinclination to invest character with meaning is a reflection of a society overloaded with the endlessly circulating signs and signifiers of consumerism which are themselves devoid of meaning and doomed to revolve forever without substance or hope of signification in an "orgy of indifference, disconnection, exhibition and circulation." [...]
[...] Ellis's fictional characters [...] have not experienced the vast cultural and politico-economic upheavals of the late 1960s and early seventies. The postmodern is the only world they know. They have inherited its treacherous freedoms without dialectics.
[...] Blair and Clay are young, rich, attractive and "in love" yet the conventional accoutrements of a happy romance -- sun, sea, sex -- bore them quickly. It is all used up within a few days and the bone-deep restlessness causes them to turn away from each other, to re-focus on the ever-present television which will be selling them dreams of exactly the kind they are engaged in. They consume their own happiness, bolting it down as though something in their awareness of themselves as this lucky, privileged couple were sickening them even as they glut. It is as though the advertisement-like, hyperreal qualities of their situation render it tenuous and unreal. What is there to say? What is there to do? What is there to be interested in? Nothing. [...]
What McInerney continually teases out of his novel is the sense that American fiction simply cannot keep up with the reality that surrounds it, and that writing must therefore serve the function of self-preservation rather than description or mere escapism. In effect McInerney builds into his novel the misgivings that other writers have expressed about the novel. [...]
Then she said, 'Do young men need sex? ...
'... Come on. What's to hide? I wish I'd known a long time ago that I was going to die. We could've gotten to know each other a lot better. There's so much we don't know' ...
You began to forget the way she looked then, and to see her somehow as young, younger than you had ever known her. The wasted flesh seemed illusory. You saw her as a young woman.'
unexpectedly sweet. from bright lights big city