If the extracts of American Psycho are horrendous, therefore, when taken out of context, that is Ellis’s fault. They are, for the most part, simply not written well enough. If one is embarked on a novel that hopes to shake American society to the core, one has to have something new to say about the outer limits of the deranged—one cannot simply keep piling on more and more acts of machicolated butchery.
The suspicion creeps in that much of what the author knows about violence does not come from his imagination (which in a great writer can need no more than the suspicion of real experience to give us the whole beast) but out of what he has picked up from Son and Grandson of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the rest of the filmic Jukes and Kallikaks. We are being given horror-shop plastic. We won’t know anything about extreme acts of violence (which we do seek to know if for no less good reason than to explain the nature of humankind in the wake of the Holocaust) until some author makes such acts intimately believable, that is, believable not as acts of description (for that is easy enough) but as intimate personal states so intimate that we enter them. That is why we are likely never to know: Where is the author ready to bear the onus of suggesting that he or she truly understands the inner logic of violence?
To create a character intimately, particularly in the first person, is to convince the reader that the author is the character. In extreme violence, it becomes more comfortable to approach from outside, as Bret Easton Ellis either chose to do, or could do no better. The failure of this book, which promises to rise occasionally to the level of the very good (when it desperately needs to be great), is that by the end we know no more about Bateman’s need to dismember others than we know about the inner workings in the mind of a wooden-faced actor who swings a broadax in an exploitation film. It’s grunts all the way down. So, the first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes is written by only a half-competent and narcissistic young pen.
Nonetheless, he is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock. So one may have to answer the question: What would you do if you happened to find yourself the unhappy publisher who discovered this book on his list two months before publication?
I am not sure of the answer. The move that appeals most in retrospect is to have delayed publication long enough to send the manuscript to ten or twelve of the most respected novelists in America for an emergency reading. Presumably, a number would respond. If a majority were clearly on the side of publication, I would feel the sanction to go ahead. To my knowledge, that possibility was never contemplated. A pity. Literature is a guild, and in a crisis, it would be good if the artisan as well as the merchants could be there to ponder the decision.
This is, of course, fanciful. No corporate publisher would ever call on an author, not even his favorite author, on such a matter, and perhaps it is just as well. A lot of serious literary talent could have passed through a crisis of conscience. How to vote on such a book? The costs of saying “Yes, you must publish” are fearful. The reaction of certain women’s groups to American Psycho has been full of unmitigated outrage.
Indeed, an extract from one of the most hideous passages in the novel was read aloud by Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, on a telephone hotline. The work is described as a “how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women … bringing torture of women and the mutilation deaths of women into an art form. We are here to say that we will not be silent victims anymore.”
While it is certainly true that the fears women have of male violence are not going to find any alleviation in this work, nonetheless I dare to suspect that the book will have a countereffect to these dread-filled expectations. The female victims in American Psycho are tortured so hideously that men with the liveliest hostility toward women will, if still sane, draw back in horror. “Is that the logical extension of my impulse to inflict cruelty?” such men will have to ask themselves, even as after World War II millions of habitual anti-Semites drew back in similar horror from the mirror of unrestrained anti-Semitism that the Nazis had offered the world.
No, the greater horror, the real intellectual damage this novel may cause is that it will reinforce Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. It is the banality of Patrick Bateman that creates his hold over the reader and gives this ugly work its force. For if Hannah Arendt is correct and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic. The extension of Arendt’s thesis is that we are absurd, and God and the Devil do not wage war with each other over the human outcome. I would rather believe that the Holocaust was the worst defeat God ever suffered at the hands of the Devil. That thought offers more life than to assume that many of us are nothing but dangerous, distorted, and no damn good.
So I cannot forgive Bret Easton Ellis. If I, in effect, defend the author by treating him at this length, it is because he has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that much anymore. On this basis, if I had been one of the authors consulted by a publisher, I would have had to say, yes, publish the book, it not only is repellent but will repel more crimes than it will excite. This is not necessarily the function of literature, but it is an obvious factor here.
What a deranging work! It is too much of a void, humanly speaking, to be termed evil, but it does raise the ante so high that one can no longer measure the size of the bet. Blind gambling is a hollow activity and this novel spins into the center of that empty space.
How the Wimp Won the War
(1991)
ON AUGUST 2, 1990, it could be said that George Bush’s media prospects were dire. The budget, prisons, drugs, inner cities, AIDS, crack, crime, and the homeless were exhibiting an obdurate, malicious, even perverse inclination to resist all solution.
There was also the $500 billion S&L scandal. While one could not yet speak of it as a cancer upon the presidency—no, not so bad as Watergate—still, it was a damn chancre at the least, and the president’s son, whether innocent, guilty, or somewhat smudged, was going to be treated by the media for the next six months as a blot on the Bush escutcheon. The media would not be media if they did not have the instincts of a lynch mob. George Bush knew that well enough. He had spent eight years in the advanced course in media manipulation under Ronald Reagan, and you could hardly not learn a lot from Ronald Reagan, who worked on the notion that most Americans would rather be told they were healthy than be healthy.
Since this condition can inspire a good deal of free-floating anxiety, Reagan also recognized that the media had acquired the power of a shadow government, ready to cater to all the dread in American life. If a widow encountered an ax murderer in her bedroom, the lady’s blood went onto the television screens that night, and the blood was sometimes as red as the ketchup in the commercial that followed. Ronald Reagan, the survivor of more than fifty B movies, understood that TV was the spirit of interruption—we were in the age of postmodernism, where anything could be connected to anything and sometimes gave you an interesting, that is, a new sensation. Ronald Reagan was ready to apply postmodernism to history and its retinue of facts. Henry Ford, who struggled with the concept when it was new, had said “History is bunk,” and was ridiculed; Reagan took the notion out of the swamps. History was not bunk but chosen statements.
If you were president, you could tell stories that were not true, yet they, too, could become facts inasmuch as denial of the statement didn’t carry one-quarter the heft of the initial declaration. It came down to knowing how to feed the media. The media were a valve installed in the governing heart of the nation, and they decided which stories would receive prominence. Reagan recognized that one had to become the valve within the valve. Otherwise, certain catastrophes could produce headlines equal to spurting arteries. They could pump away the plasma of your reputation. When 241 Marines were killed in Beirut by one bomb carried in one truck by one Arab terrorist on October 23, 1983, Reagan gave the order two days later to invade Gre
nada. A catastrophe must immediately be replaced by another act so bold that it, too, may end in catastrophe—that takes moxie!
Grenada worked, however. Nineteen hundred Marines conquered something like half their number of Cuban construction workers, and the media were banned from reporting events firsthand for the three days of the campaign. Then America celebrated the victory. A phenomenon ensued. The American public reacted as if the victory in Grenada had removed the shame of Vietnam.
Only a political genius can turn a debacle into a media success, and George Bush had studied Ronald Reagan with all the intensity of an unwanted child for eight hard years, taken his snubs, suffered the nitty-twit positions Reagan left him in, and the wimp slanders prevalent in the press. George Bush was keen, lean, competitive, and wanted the presidency as much as any vice president before him. Without it, he had nothing to anticipate but an enduring reputation as the ex-vice-presidential wimp. Male pride is insufficiently appreciated. It can approach earthquake force. George Bush was not to be stopped by the likes of Dole or Dukakis; George Bush knew that you win elections by kissing the great American electorate on the mouth—“I want a kinder, gentler nation”—and by kicking the opposition in the nuts.
Grenada may have demonstrated that the need for pride in one’s patriotism was the largest unsatisfied love in American life, but the most feared nightmare in American life (now that the Evil Empire was benign) had to be the black criminal avenger whom good liberals were blind enough to let out of jail long enough to rape a white, doubtless Christian, female person. The case of Willie Horton was a real shitkicker’s stomp, and the creative author, Lee Atwater, who happened to be an aficionado of black music, would subsequently develop a tumor in his head and would die last month. Who can say how much he felt inwardly condemned for conceiving and carrying out such a caper on a people whose music he loved.
George Bush cut his thin thread of congressional liaison to the Democratic Party with Willie Horton (and that would cost him later, since Democrats do control Congress), but then, he did not know at the time that Michael Dukakis would prove lead-footed as a candidate. Bush saw the immediate world head-on. Win the presidency. Do not debate the efficacy of overkill. Swear allegiance to the first precept of Ronald Reagan: Be as shallow as spit on a rock and you will prevail. Bush prevailed and entered the postmodern American presidency of crack, crime, AIDS—we have the list.
On August 2, 1990, however, the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein entered American life.
Before it was all over, there would be people to suggest—King Hussein of Jordan, for one—that Saddam Hussein was provoked into crossing the border by Mubarak of Egypt, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the State Department, and presumably the CIA. This is, of course, paranoid, which by writer’s rule of thumb means not within the parameters of my piece. We will assume for the purposes of this reconnoiter through recent history that it was no more than George Bush’s good luck for Saddam Hussein to misread a few signs en route to gobbling the Kuwaitis. That sort of error would not have been difficult to make. Saddam was endangered at home by problems as deep as the need of other people to see him dead, and he was surrounded by sycophants who would never indicate that an unhappy matter could be the leader’s fault, a condition which is tonic for a leader’s vanity, but does feed elephantiasis of the ego.
In addition, Saddam was a poet. “The mother of all battles” is a metaphor primeval enough to reach into the nightmares of every infantryman arrayed against him. No poet ever believes he or she is incapable of world-shaking moves. When you know the power of the word, you depend on it.
To strengthen this mix, the president of Iraq was a degenerate gambler. He had played all his life with table stakes larger than he could afford. That was his strength. Few men gain a sense of personal power greater than does a degenerate gambler who has not been destroyed by his vice. One tends to believe that God, or Providence, or some mysterious demiurge like Lady Luck, is enraptured with your presence on earth.
Hitler held to such beliefs; there may be no other explanation for him. So, by an extrapolation of his imagination, George Bush was able to speak of Saddam Hussein as Hitler, and that was certainly a page taken from the gnomic maxims of Ronald Reagan—a Muslim Hitler who comes to the stage as your foe can do a lot to save the American presidency.
Now, Saddam could conceivably have become as monstrous as Hitler. For that, however, he would have had to acquire Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Emirates, then Iran and Syria (two formidably indigestible items) plus Israel—a major war—and Egypt, and North Africa. There may not be the rudiments of enough administrative ability in all of Islam to take care of such an empire, temperamentally supercharged, technologically Third World, oil-rich, and revolution-rife; yes, if you can conquer all of that in a decade, when Saudi Arabia alone is one-quarter the size of the United States, then you are the equal of Adolf Hitler and would doubtless exhibit the same cavernous disregard for the deaths of whole millions of people; yes, putting Saddam Hussein into the equation with Hitler was also a metaphor, but then, George Bush was even competitive about that. Saddam Hussein was Hitler, QED, and there would be no Munichs for George.
On a stripped budget, Hussein could have been stopped, probably, from moving into Saudi Arabia by sending over a division of Marines with naval and air support. The troops could have been kept—as they were, in fact, for months—hundreds of miles south of the Kuwait border. It would have been effective militarily if one wanted to avoid war; it would have drawn, precisely, a line in the sand.
George Bush, however, needed war. It would take no less than that to dig into the macho meat of B-movie sentiments. As Ronald Reagan had delineated, this was the real emotional broth of a majority of voting Americans—they had, after all, put in their time growing up on the narrative reflexes of B movies, plus all the A movies that happened to be no more elevated in sentimental vision than the B movies. George Bush could avoid war by keeping a token force in Saudi Arabia—and who but the Kuwaitis would grieve for Kuwait?—but the prognosis suggested poor media potential; the action could downgrade itself into one headline blight after another. A task force underwriting such a limited peace in the Middle East would hardly be large enough to accomplish dramatic results. Incidents were bound to occur. Carousing soldiers would sooner or later be killed by Saudi policemen (which, in the absence of other news, would loom as large as a tank battle). Governing America in company with the media is like spending a honeymoon with your mother-in-law’s ear to the door. George Bush’s aim was hardly going to focus, therefore, on something as minimal as avoiding a war; his goal was to save his presidency. For that, nothing less than a major campaign would do.
Many a political leader has the ability to bear comparison to Napoleon for a season. Maggie Thatcher had the Falklands in 1982, and it gave her eight and a half more years of political life. The president, abetted by the skills of his secretary of state, had a few such weeks in August 1990: showing precisely the sort of competence Michael Dukakis had advertised as his own first virtue, Bush and Baker succeeded between them in establishing UN sanctions against Iraq. Twenty-eight countries joined the coalition. A mighty and magnetic movement toward war got under way in America against an outraged liberal defense: “No blood for oil.”
The liberals had the commonsense logic, the good ethics, the good morals, the antiwar pieties, the slogans, the demonstrations, and the inner conviction that they were on the side of the angels, but they were entering a trap larger and deeper than any of the moats ablaze with burning oil that Saddam Hussein had promised American troops. Intellectually speaking, liberal ideology had become about as stimulating as motel furniture. You could get through a night with it provided you didn’t have to hang around in the morning. Liberalism was opposed to war, poverty, hunger, AIDS, drugs, corruption in high places, crowded prisons, budget cuts, sexism, racism, and opposition to gay liberation, but it had not had an idea in twenty-five years for solving any of those problems.
George Bush, however, had heard the music of the Pied Piper. He knew that Ronald Reagan had launched America on a fiduciary way of life once practiced by Marie Antoinette and various members of the French, British, and Russian aristocracy. One spent lavishly for one’s pleasures, sold one’s cherry orchards (a transaction we are, at present, arranging with the Japanese), and looked for entertainments that would offer new zest for life not only to the people who were attending the ball but to the populace watching outside. Reagan established the principle: you cannot be a good president unless you keep the populace entertained. Reagan understood what hard workers like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter did not; he saw that the president of the United States was the leading soap-opera figure in the great American drama, and one had better possess star value. The president did not have to have executive ability nearly as much as an interesting personality. A touch of the selfish or the unscrupulous—just a touch!—might be necessary to keep a hero interesting.
Ronnie, of course, was perfect—the nicest movie actor ever to serve up his young manhood to losing the girl to the handsome guy who might not deserve her quite as much. His presidency was delivered from that hint of insipidity, however, by the presence of Nancy. She suggested more than a few touches of the cruel, the narrow, and the exclusive. So, they were interesting. You followed them. You kept waiting over eight years, like the rest of the American public, to see one small crack in the surface of their marriage. You never succeeded, but then, the rockbottom aesthetic of the long-running soap opera is to keep the same anticipation alive.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 47