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[...] 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. [...]
[...] It was hardly surprising that a novel which unequivocally condemned a way of life to which many people had sacrificed their youth and energy was tepidly received; journalists were as much at the mercy of the status-driven conspicuous consumption of the eighties as anyone else and the forth over the book's alleged violence may have concealed a hideous disquiet that the leotards and Agnes B. leggings, the enormous mortgages and obscene restaurant bills were ... just ... not worth it.
on american pyscho
[...] that still leaves the problem of trying to define when the author himself has decided to distance himself from events. He might, for example, mistrust women but presumably he wasn't in favour of popping out people's eyeballs? This put the critic in the ludicrous position of, firstly, supplying the moral framework to the book and arguing, in effect, for dualism and old-fashioned fictive ambiguity and secondly, of having to tangle with the autobiographical element in fiction -- of defining the author's own feelings, intentions and standards. This has the effect of turning the tables on the reader; rather than being presented with a well-ordered fictive universe, secure in its moral delineation, the reader is, forced to engage personally with the text, to fill in the blanks, as it were, if he is not to produce a completely coarse and slip-shod reading. The reader is forced to scrutinize his own values and beliefs, rather than those being provided for him within a Good-Evil fictive universe. The alternative is to reject these misleading binary oppositions that Jacques Derrida has defined as intrinsic to Western thinking and to immerse oneself in the free play of signifiers within the text. Ellis himself does not achieve judgment and closure in the text but an endless circularity and deferral of meaning.
[...] Towards the end of the book, when Patrick's narrative increasingly tends to shiver and shake around the edges, the litany of designer names begins to falter: shoes by "Susan Warren Bennis Edwards" becomes shoes by "Warren Susan Allen Edmonds" and then shoes by "Edward Susan Bennis Allen". For such a tiny detail this is conspicuous in its effects. What ego-madness possesses a designer (and she's certainly not the only one) that she will inflict an insanely complex name on an entire retinue of stockists, advertisers, fashion-journalists and consumers? Why do we meekly accept and repeatedly intone such a vast array of fancy, complex, weirdly spelt (Manolo Blahnik) and obviously self-assumed names? What drives Patrick crazy is driving us all crazy -- why don't we all just crack up and start screaming about brand-names and up-town pizza recipes, like he does? Thus, detail by detail, as if bricking up a tomb, Ellis defines Patrick's insanity and our own place within it.
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[...] any encounter with Luis tends towards the farcical. When he returns from his business trip to Phoenix he describes the dinner he had with his client, a routine-sounding affair of roasted chicken and cheesecake. Patrick gets anxious, confused "by this alien, plain-sounding list". He asks feverishly, "What sauce or fruits were on the roasted chicken? What shapes was it cut into?" Luis is confused. "It was ... roasted,"he says. Patrick demands to know what the client's bimbo had. Scallops, apparently. "The scallops were grilled? Were they sashimi scallops? In a ceviche of sorts? ... Or were they gratinized?" "No, Patrick," Luis says. "They were ... broiled." Patrick then thinks for a while. "What's broiled, Luis?" "I'm not sure," he says. "I think it involves ... a pan." There lies the gulf between the yuppies and the rest of the known world.
why is this so funny
American Dad, published originally in 1981, was [...] chiefly remarkable for Janowitz's choice of a male narrator and protagonist. It is relatively rare for a woman writer to adopt the male voice [...] women become, in theoretical terms, bisexual and it is rare for them to go further and claim the male voice in its entirey [...] Janowitz does not use the male persona here to deliver any sarcastic feminist critique of men. Her portrayal [....] is a gentle and sympathetic on as if she had merely transposed many of her own adolescent memories -- as one does in a first novel -- into a male body without any particular reflection on the obsession with gender difference that had seized the rest of the Western world [...] it frees Janowitz from any of the constraints of representing a world newly imbued with feminism which would have been unavoidable with a female narrator. At the same time it allows her to usurp a very male tradition of American fiction [...]
Now, after everything possible has been done to the form of the novel the whole future of fiction seems to hang in the balance. Will anyone, apart from scholars, read at all in the future? Surveys suggest that relatively few people read books even now and that of those, the majority tend towards genre -- romance, crime, horror - much of which echoes the conventions of traditional narrative in terms of plot, structure and character. "Serious" fiction seems to belong increasingly to academia and the academics, to the creative writing class and the beleagured intellectual rather than to the public at large. It has become too frail and etiolated a plant to survive out there in the world among the crashing music, the clamour and the cartoons of contemporary life. Novelists wish to be read but realism in fiction is no longer a device that can animate characters who inhabit this modern world; their desires, their love affairs, their very selves are now so muddled by commodity fetishism, consumer homogeneity and a chaos of contemporary cultural imperatives that it is now almost impossible for authors to animate and illuminate character in the ways that they were once able to do.