The things you hate about art
Last week I finished reading American Psycho. It was the most disgusting book I have ever read in my life.
I have many questions....many. I think its interesting to think of the torture and murder in the book as a metaphor for the American Capitalist dream, but the juries still out on how far I'm willing to go with something and come back from it enough to say, it's just a metaphor. At some point, the depravity in that book says more about the imagination of the author then it ever will about Mergers and Acquisitions under Reaganomics. I am willing to believe that those people were devoid of morals, but this...this is something else. We may talk about society as a gloss over for "man as animal", but I don't think the Pat Bateman that shows through is an animal...and yet, there is something compelling about the novel and the questions it raises that makes it, if not worth reading, then at least worth talking about for those of us who are unfortunate enough to have read it. It's like, "Adaptation," hated the movie; loved talking about the movie. It's a kind of reaction to art that we rarely are willing to accept. Take Mapplethorpe and all those Fisting photos. People either hated them, or they praised them, but no one really said, "I hate them, now let's talk." Maybe it's a legitimate response that we have, otherwise, decided to forget.
In any case, I'm now reading "A Frolic of One's Own," "Riddley Walker," and (still) "Against The Day." Oh yeah, and the other day I read Jacques Derrida's "No Apocalypse, Not Now," which was difficult to read, but again, in the end, interesting.
I have many questions....many. I think its interesting to think of the torture and murder in the book as a metaphor for the American Capitalist dream, but the juries still out on how far I'm willing to go with something and come back from it enough to say, it's just a metaphor. At some point, the depravity in that book says more about the imagination of the author then it ever will about Mergers and Acquisitions under Reaganomics. I am willing to believe that those people were devoid of morals, but this...this is something else. We may talk about society as a gloss over for "man as animal", but I don't think the Pat Bateman that shows through is an animal...and yet, there is something compelling about the novel and the questions it raises that makes it, if not worth reading, then at least worth talking about for those of us who are unfortunate enough to have read it. It's like, "Adaptation," hated the movie; loved talking about the movie. It's a kind of reaction to art that we rarely are willing to accept. Take Mapplethorpe and all those Fisting photos. People either hated them, or they praised them, but no one really said, "I hate them, now let's talk." Maybe it's a legitimate response that we have, otherwise, decided to forget.
In any case, I'm now reading "A Frolic of One's Own," "Riddley Walker," and (still) "Against The Day." Oh yeah, and the other day I read Jacques Derrida's "No Apocalypse, Not Now," which was difficult to read, but again, in the end, interesting.
posted by Monstro D. Whale at
10:12 AM
10 Comments:
Yeah, it's one of those books you're "supposed to have read" -- kind of the hip new trendy thing for a while there in the 90s, sort of like Jay McInerney before him. But, I never read it (though I did read McInerney) on purpose. Literary or not, metaphor or not, I just don't care to go there. What brought you to it, anyway? Morbid curiosity?
This is one I too have avoided.
I'm on my comps, to answer the question. I cover three areas: one of them is American Satires of economic morality (money makes right). The other night I heard about the Yes Men which is too bad because it's too late to put their movies on my list.
American Psycho is, for better or worse, a satire of economic morality. It is as much a commentary on capitalist America as is Fight Club. Strangely, violence seems at the center of these kinds of books.
My other two areas are: depictions of Nazis in American film, and literature involving particle physics (post apocalypse but also narratives that have that "quantum mechanical" feel).
It's pretty fun stuff so far. Though, Ridley Walker is a damned nightmare. I have no idea what's going on.
I might add that if you do read American Psycho, I would avoid seriously, anything following a section of pornography. If what you're reading sounds like a letter to Hustler, it will be followed by someone being tortured to death by a nail gun, a can of mace, and a drill. If I could read the book again, I think I would have skipped those parts.
As I probably mentioned before... I'm about 950 pp. into Atlas Shrugged now. In an odd way, I guess it's also an "American satire of economic morality" -- only it argues pro-Capitalism.(*) The satire in this case would be against the socialist / statist / communist direction that Rand saw the USA heading.
Your course of study sounds highly interesting, yet it seems almost frighteningly expansive -- like you'd have to know an awful lot about many other disciplines besides literature in order to back up your theses (e.g., psychology, political science, history, etc.) -- not to mention particle physics! (Actually, I understand the hard sciences much more than the softer ones, so I'd like the physics stuff.)
(*) Footnote: Just to be clear, when I said "pro-capitalism," I was referring to Rand's vision of man as a noble, heroic being -- certainly not a criminal type such as Patrick Bateman. The heroic protagonists of Atlas Shrugged are pure free-market capitalists; they're also people of remarkable knowledge, ability, reason, purpose, and moral standing.
In a way, Rand's vision does not contrast so much with many anti-capitalistic works because her brand of protagonists do not exist in the world of Ellis and so many others, possibly even Pynchon to a lesser extent. She would have the same problem with Patrick Bateman as Ellis does, the same problem with Scarsdale Vibe as TRP. In Ellis' world, there's no such thing as a noble capitalist, I suppose. Maybe that's exactly what he's saying -- except I personally disagree with that. And, I think TRP does too, to some extent (e.g., considering his fascination with men of science and technology -- Tesla, et al.).
I don't really think that Pynchon is against capitalism. Some of his most memorable characters are capitalists. Hell, Pierce Inverarity from Crying of Lot 49 is sort of money incarnate.
For Pynchon, anything that makes us dream is good, because for him, it is our lack of fantasy that drives us mad. Thus, the paranoid is always in a covetable postion. He wakes up and knows what's going on where as we don't. In that sense, money gives us something to fantasize about. The only thing I would say is that the fantasies that money brings can seem to be terminal. I say seem because quite often money brings about any number of calamities which in and of themselves create fantasy worlds.
My problem with American Psycho is that Bateman is psychotic, and there's every reason to believe that he was psychotic before he became a yuppie and that he became a yuppie simply to fit in. Put another way, the biography of John Wayne Gacie is not a satire on clowns. So...there's the problem. I liked the idea that Bateman kills people so that he can distinguish himself from all the other yuppies, but then you find out that he's already distinguished: he was born so wealthy that he doesn't really have to work.
That's the problem with that book. It may simply boil down to the fact that he's nuts and he just happens to be a Wallstreet type. The two things may be completely mutually exclusive.
Plus, it may all just be in his head. I think the movie did a pretty good job on that.
By the way, I think that Ellis and American Psycho are popular for the very reasons that Ayn Rand is not.
Rand wrote during a time that was pretty pro-American and it was interesting to a lot of people to see a kind of new way of looking at capitalism. She was a Russian with a bone to pick with communism and she wrote during the cold war. Not that I'm taking away from her talent, but now that there is no cold war, attention to Rand kind of trails off. On the other hand, as capitalism is no longer a bulwark against communism, it can again be aggressively satirized...and let me tell you, American Psycho is aggressive. This is a novel set in the 80s, but I hardly think it would have been received well back then (critiques of this type were the provence of The Dead Kennedys to give you some idea). When the cold war fell, rock and roll ceased to be about good old American values and good v. evil, and began to be about...I don't know... Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains. Compare that to Judas Priest, Ratt, Iron Maiden, Poisen, etc.. When their was an evil empire, Ozzy could get by as the prince of darkness. No cold war, and Ozzy gets a show and looks like an idiot.
My point is that American Psycho was innovative for being early in this switch as far as literature is concerned. Whether this is a reason to grant it laurels, I don't know. It's just interesting to look at this moment as a literary switch as much as a political switch.
That's a good point about the cold war... I just wanted to add that Rand's controversy, then and now, also has to do with her rather unique position along the political spectrum. While she was practically an evangelist vis-a-vis pure capitalism, she had a real problem with both the mainstream conservative and liberal agendas, each holding what she viewed as fundamentally irrational stances on various subjects. I'm not sure which she hated more, actually, but that truth is evident in her writings into the 1980s.
Anyway, true... those among the first to express / encapsulate the themes of a new generation are generally considered innovative and garner considerable attention. I suppose there's something to be said for that achievement alone, though I kind of have a history of not giving enough credit where it's due in that category -- e.g., my rant about not loving Jackson Pollock. Same thing, really... he pioneered this whole new thing, and I simply didn't like it. Not that that means anything in the grand scheme, of course. Same for Mapplethorpe. Bullwhips in the rectum just aren't my thing, I guess.
You probably saw this already, but just in case you didn't:
http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_6620943?nclick_check=1
Monstro, you may be interested in this:
http://tegehel.deviantart.com/art/Birth-of-Cthulhu-62464392
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